While the back-and-forth between the two has yet to escalate into an out-and-out conflict, reading between the lines makes it clear that there's more than a little disagreement over the future of Flash on the iPhone--or whether indeed it even has a future.

In March 2008, during Apple's annual shareholder meeting, Steve Jobs was asked about Flash and : Adobe's desktop Flash program was too intensive for the iPhone, and its mobile-oriented Flash Lite product just wasn't good enough. "There's this missing product in the middle," Jobs told Apple shareholders. "It just doesn't exist."

Anybody who's spent time with Flash on Mac OS X has probably noticed that it's an incredibly intensive piece of software, especially compared to its Windows counterpart. The software can bring even capable machines to their knees, ramping up their processors and devouring their free memory like a half-starved piranha. Such resource use has, to put it lightly, a negative impact on performance--especially on battery life, something that's even more of a concern on a mobile device like the iPhone. For what it's worth, Adobe is cognizant of these factors. In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen called Flash on the iPhone , which is a bit like saying that Lost is a "little" convoluted.

There's also the matter of the limitations of iPhone development. It's widely known that the language of Apple's iPhone SDK agreement prohibits developers from using interpreted code other than what the iPhone already has baked in--that covers everything from BASIC emulators to Java virtual machines, and yes, Flash. Of course, since Apple's the ultimate arbiter of the development terms, it could certainly choose to let Adobe sidestep them, but the bottom line is that Adobe isn't going to be able to create Flash for the iPhone without Apple's explicit approval. "This is definitely something Apple and Adobe will have to partner on," said Michael Gartenberg, vice president of strategy and analytics for media and technology research firm Interpret.

Besides the issue of intensive resources, there are other reasons that Apple might not be thrilled by the idea of Flash on the iPhone. For one thing, it opens up the possibility that developers could write programs for the platform in a language other than Apple's own anointed Cocoa. Apple's shown it wants to have complete control of the iPhone platform, and it's not going to make a move that cedes even a little bit of power to another company.