As announced at its worldwide developers conference, the news that Adobe has enabled the conversion of Flash games into native iPhone apps has split opinions among developers.

"I'm excited to see how the Flash games community explores this technology. Flash authors are extremely creative, and I hope we can show traditional iPhone developers a thing or two," says Josh Tynjala, CEO of Bowler Hat Games. Bowler Hat’s Chroma Circuit Flash game was one of eight games already available on the App Store that Adobe used to highlight the ease of using its Flash Professional package.

"Will there be a ton of new releases? Yes. Will most of them be of dubious quality? Yes," says Paul Farley, MD of developer Tag Games, which counts original iPhone games such as Car Jack Streets and the forthcoming Astro Ranch amongst its calling cards. Considering the tens of thousands of Flash games available on the web, dividing lines were always going to be drawn around issues such as the quality of technology and content, although these also hide commercial hopes and fears.

Flash developers who haven't been able to release games for iPhone because of technical barriers of entry are keen to try out a brave new world in which a select few hits can generate hundreds of thousands of paid-for downloads. Meanwhile, iPhone developers trying to create sustainable businesses on an App Store already containing over 17,000 games worry their task is only going to be made harder as that number quickly accelerates to 20,000.

Dig down deeper, however, and there is a consensus of sorts. "I think if the App Store was going to die under the weight of poor quality releases it would have happened already," says Farley. "Visibility is already difficult but that doesn't seem to stop a steady flow of quality titles succeeding."

He also says that the required complexity for developers, especially in terms of handling cross-platform development, means the long term impact of native Flash apps appearing on the App Store is easy to over-estimate. "There are some things that Flash doesn't do well. If you're trying to build a game with console-quality 3D graphics, Flash isn't going to be a great fit for your needs," he points out. For example, as well as iPhone, Tag's Car Jack Streets and Astro Ranch are being released via PSP Minis and DSiWare and this requires native coding.

Maxwell Scott-Slade from UK studio JohnnyTwoShoes, which has made Flash games such as Heist and the Banana Dash series, says that he doesn't think the performance of Flash is even good enough on the iDevices. "Being able to develop in ActionScript and have it run on the iPhone like a native app sounds great. The only problem is, it's very slow on the device and performance can be terrible," he says. "We developed our iPhone game High Speed Chase natively. There's no incentive go back to using ActionScript to make lower performance games now we can code natively."

David Hamilton, MD of iPhone developer Digital Goldfish, which made the iPhone version of classic Flash webgame Bloons in ObjectiveC, reckons issues such as user interface and control method can be more of a problem when it comes to converting Flash games. "While some great web games will work, many won't provide the same enjoyment without the use of physical buttons," he explains.

Yet there are those who point out the future evolution of the technology could be significant. 
Before founding Bolt Creative and releasing the 1.2 million-selling iPhone app Pocket God, Dave Castelnuovo ran a Flash development studio. He wishes he could combine the ease of use of Adobe’s toolchain with the flexibility of native coding. "I think Flash is the best way for developers to organise interactive 2D assets and animations and be able to hook them up to code resources in an object- oriented manner," he says.

"In order for Flash to be the standard way that people develop 2D interactive content, Adobe needs to address serious developers who require the flexibility of having low-level access to the platform they are developing on. I hope it takes the next step and opens up the iPhone app export functionality so developers who use their own rendering engines can benefit from the CS5 toolset."

In the meantime, however, Flash developers such as Bowler Hat Games' Josh Tynjala are just excited to be able to have access to the App Store and its potential riches. "What I'm most excited about is monetisation," he says. "For a game developer, having many sources of revenue is important, and Adobe has helped me find one more."