Yes that’s right, you can now build iPhone apps with Flash using the functionality which was introduced in Flash CS5, following Apple’s announcement last night that it is relaxing the rules in it’s “App Store Review Guidelines”.
You might recall Adobe introduced this great new functionality earlier this year with Flash CS5, allowing Flash developers to build apps in Flash and then compile them quickly and easily to run on an iPhone or iPad as native apps. Apple then issued an announcement on almost the same day as the launch that it was changing it’s T’s and C’s so that apps compiled with 3rd party tools (such as Flash) wouldn’t be accepted into the iTunes Store. There was quite a bit of noise around this at the time as Apple had basically squashed the single biggest new features in Flash CS5 in one go.
Well the good news for Flash developers is that Apple has now reversed this decision having “listened to our developers and taken much of their feedback to heart”.
It’s never easy doing an about turn and this was a fairly high profile and vocale debate at the time, so the change of direction is great news for Flash developers and will make their life a lot easier (and in my opinion good for Apple, who will have even more people developing iPhone apps now, albeit they had quite a few already).
Over the next month or so we will be finishing off a new one day course on “Developing Mobile Applications with Flash” which will make full use of this and other features. If you can think of anything in particular you would like to see covered in this course then let us know, as we are very open to suggestions.