Flash iPhone Apps - Good or Bad?

I recently was delighted to find out that Adobe will be releasing a feature in its new version of Flash, CS5 mid next year sometime that will enable Flash to export to iPhone apps. How good is that? Way to bring the mountain to Mohummad Adobe!

This sounds like a great idea giving all us budding ActionScript developers and designers a chance to develop for the iPhone without learning the XCode Objective C and C programming languages.

However upon further investigation there is a bit of criticism surrounding the authenticity of such an application in terms of how it will perform on the iPhone, how will bugs, testing and debugging work in the Flash IDE and on the iPhone, along with other things such as not getting full access to all the libraries and functions the iPhone offers such as the photo library and finally file size may be an issue due to the fact it uses a virtual machine to run on the iPhone.

These are all speculative thoughts as CS5 is yet to be released and are simply considerations for both Adobe while working on the feature and for Developers when they decide to create an iPhone app, and if so if to use Flash or XCode.

So is Flash on the iPhone is a good or bad thing? Generally I think good. Its defiantly a great advantage for Flash Developers to get their stuff out onto the iPhone though I think it remains to be tested thoroughly by these developers and even your average Joe. Say all the bugs, testing and performance issues were fixed I still think that there would be some advantages of developing your app in XCode rather than Flash such as file size which given the nature of the way Flash will be using a virtual machine to run on the iPhone, Flash will inevitably add file size. However the say there is a right tool for the right job, and I think if you can make Flash work for you on the iPhone then its definitely a good thing. I am a Lecturer at Sydney University and am just wondering about the posiblities of adding an Flash for iPhone component into the course... how would students react and who would be interested, I wonder? I'm sure it would be a good thing for students to learn.

Useful links:
Adobe at MAX
http://cs5.org/?p=359
Adobe's CS5 to iPhone information and videos
http://www.adobe.com/iphone
http://adage.com/digitalnext/article?article_id=140566
Adobe CS5 FAQs
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Applications_for_iPhone:Developer_FAQ
Some speculative blog entrys on the topic
http://www.taterboy.com/blog/2009/10/use-flash-pro-cs5-to-build-iphone-apps/