Adobe to Apple: “Bye bye then”

Kevin Lynch, the chief technical officer of software developer Adobe, has posted a terse response to the criticism levelled at Flash technology by Apple chief Steve Jobs last week.

Given the now notorious legal terms Apple has imposed upon its developer community, Lynch said that Adobe has decided to shift its focus away from the iPhone and iPad devices for both Flash Player and Air.

Instead, Adobe will focus on developing products for all the other major participants in the mobile ecosystem, namely, Google, RIM, Palm/HP, Microsoft, and Nokia as well as others.

“The primary issue at hand is that Apple is choosing to block Adobe’s widely used runtimes as well as a variety of technologies from other providers,” Lynch said.

Adobe said that it plans to deliver Flash Player 10.1 for Android as a public preview at Google I/O in May, and then a general release in June. Check out this video of Flash Player running on Android from Mobile World Congress in February 2010.

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In related news, Apple said that it sold its one millionth iPad on Friday, 28 days after the introduction of the device on April 3. In addition, iPad users have already downloaded over 12 million apps from the App Store and over 1.5 million ebooks from the iBookstore.

Developers have created over 5,000 apps specifically for the iPad, although the device will run almost all of the more than 200,000 apps on the App Store.