The dark satanic rumour mill claims that it might not be Adobe which is the reason that Flash will not run on the iPhone.

Officially Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen has said that it is hard work to get the iPhone to run flash. He said that Apple and Adobe were collaborating but it is hard work and blamed his own outfit for not coming up with the goods

In late September and early October, many tech sites reported comments from Paul Betlem, Adobe's director of engineering, who said that Adobe had stuck Flash on the iPhone. However, he pointed out that more work was needed with Apple “beyond what is available through the SDK, its emulation environment and the current license around it to bring the full capabilities of Flash to the iPhone.”

Apple has a good reason why it does not want Flash on the iPhone.  It would lose control of both it and the iPod Touch as a mobile platform.  Apple is even more of a legendary control freak than Microsoft and this is something it just does not want to do.

There certainly appears to be few places that Flash developers cannot stick their software, so what is it that makes the iPhone is a "hard technical challenge"? We can only guess, but the dark satanic rumour mill suggests it might be that Apple issued demands to Adobe that mean it will only install Flash when it does not break the rest of Apple's controls.

Maybe it will be a cut down version of Flash that plays back content but cannot be developed by the great unwashed.