What that means is that if you buy an or , which all run iOS, you still won't be able to run Flash-supported media when browsing to an application on a Web site, analysts and Adobe confirmed. Applications for iOS installed in the iPhone or iPad are another matter, however.

What Adobe announced on Monday primarily gives its many thousands of developers the ability to use the Adobe Air software to build an app for and BlackBerry Tablet OS and iOS, with only minor changes to suit each platform, instead of needing to write an entirely new app for each platform, Adobe said.

Part of the importance of Adobe's tool update is that developers can more easily build installed applications for iOS "and they don't need the Flash Player to support native installed apps," Dave Gruber, group product marketing manager for Adobe, told Computerworld.

Developers can already use Action Script, a tool inside the Flash platform, to build iOS apps, Gruber said. But that process has taken more time if the developer was creating an app for iOS already written for Android, for example.

Those apps written for iOS in the past, and with the 4.5 updates coming in June for iOS, can make use of the Air runtime software to support animations and other features seen in games and other applications, Gruber said.