The subject of Flash on the iPhone is a rather difficult one; on the one hand you have the consumer, who longs for the technology to become available on the device they've paid for, though in contrast you have Apple, which is against the idea (at least according to Steve Jobs).
The software giant Adobe, known well for its design products such as Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Flash, has provided a solution to having Flash on your Apple device, though it's not exactly what most people would think. The purpose of this is to create iPhone applications built with Flash itself, as opposed to Objective-C & Cocoa in Xcode, using the CS5 version of Adobe's popular media software; this doesn't in any way mean that Safari-based Flash is coming any time soon. Flash CS5, currently in beta (though not publicly until later this year), has had a website set up by Adobe here for the purpose of showcasing the technology, demonstrating how well the applications run as well as advertising applications which have already been built with this method (yes, there are already commercially available Flash-based iPhone apps on the App Store).
A senior product manager at Adobe, Aditya Bansod, said in a blog post, "We created a new compiler front end that allowed LLVM [Low Level Virtual Machine] to understand ActionScript 3 and used its existing ARM back end to output native ARM assembly code. When you build your application for the iPhone, there is no interpreted code and no runtime in your final binary. Your application is truly a native iPhone app."
If you're a developer and you're keen to try this out, you can sign up for the beta, in order to get access as soon as possible. Otherwise, the final version of Flash CS5 will be available in the distant future. This will no doubt mean many of the popular web-based Flash games available on the Internet may be hitting the App Store sometime next year (or perhaps the end of this year), which is great for developers as well as consumers.
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