Adobe has been working on iPhone export from CS5 for quite some time. It was announced in Oct 2009 and in general beta testers have been producing apps using their beta product since that time.
Here’s a short list of iTunes store apps that have been approved already:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcs5/appsfor_iphone/
Now, as of Friday Apple has changed the SDK terms to deny these types of applications from being produced for the iPhone. Apple understandably is concerned with performance and I tend to agree that there should be some level of quality control but in general when you limit an environment to only one type of development environment you end up with a homogenous development path. There are some really well done things in Flash, and some very poorly developed things but without the freedom to experiment then the environment become stale pretty fast (I know that Objective C is not for every developer). When you have such great tools like Visual Studio and C# to work in why would you want to restrict users from building a pipeline from that environment to the apple one. The concern that I have is that Apple is not being totally honest with it’s developer network in how it ‘sells’ the XCode compiler — there must be some level of background control that is determining that this product is the only ‘authorized’ way of coding an iPhone app. It’s very similar to how PocketPC development was handled but Multidmedia used to have a pocket pc packager that allowed me to build flash based apps for pocket pc in 2003 so we really aren’t out of the environment of reality when you consider that very often these types of apps allow marketing firms to deliver their message in a more cohesive way than having to go through a ‘store’ metaphore — where’s the benefit of marketing to a store when the ROI is so limited to your marketing costs? And then you have to assume that folks will want to use your limited scope marketing product. The CS 5 iPhone Flash app packager was a godsend to marketers but in the end will fall short. I guess marketers with their deep budgets will have to turn to the other 80% of the smartphone market that will have this ability in the next six months. And don’t forget the Windows 7 operating system for smartphones coming at the end of the year — it’ll be using on silverlight (Microsofts Flash equivalent plug in architecture) and that will be something to watch out for — for once Microsoft may actually get something other than PC operating systems right.