Apple blocking Flash-built apps because of multitasking?

Following up on news that the iPhone 4.0 developer agreement prohibits cross-compiled third-party apps, AppleInsider received info that multitasking in iPhone OS 4.0 is the reason for the change. According to their sources, apps built in environments like Flash CS5 won't co-operate well with Apple's multitasking scheme. "The system will now be evaluating apps as they run in order to implement smart multitasking. It can't do this if apps are running within a runtime or are cross compiled with a foreign structure that doesn't behave identically to a native C/C++/Obj-C app," according to AppleInsider. "Apple needs full access to a properly-compiled app to do the pull off the tricks they are with this new OS," one of their readers said.

So it's not a grand conspiracy to kick Adobe while it's down, not about arbitrarily restricting developers to Apple's own programming tools, and not about squashing competition. If AppleInsider's sources are correct, banning apps built via Flash CS5 is really about ensuring that all apps run properly in Apple's new multitasking environment.