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One of the great gaps in the iPhone's feature set has been the lack of support for Adobe Flash, with Apple claiming this was not up to the advanced video tasks the iPhone required, leading to a major stand-off in the contest to set de facto mobile web standards. Now Adobe has announced that a Flash player is in the works for the iPhone.

Paul Petiem, senior director of engineering at Adobe, confirmed this week that his company is working on an application to enable Flash playback on iPhone - but then poured some cold water on the announcement that will cheer many developers and users, by reminding us that the iPhone a closed platform, an so ultimately it will Apple's decision whether or not to approve Adobe's application.

Currently, the iPhone is unable to load web sites running Flash animations, audio, video or games and this is always in the top three complaints against the handset, which would seem a good motivation for Apple to adopt the Adobe software - but given their past history and their mutual wish to lead the mobile web industry on the video front, the Mac maker may prove stubborn.

The Flash player would compete with games sold through the iPhone App Store and Apple has recently shown itself very willing to reject third party applications that compete with its own - like iTunes - or conflict with its own software strategy in any way. The company has recently been accused of being anti-competitive for rejecting applications submitted to the App Store on the grounds that they "duplicate" the handset's features.

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