Popular tech blog, Engadget, reported yesterday that Apple is tightening its grip on iPhone development yet again. Developers have always been at Apple’s mercy when it came to getting an app approved for the iPhone, but now Apple has introduced some strict guidelines that control not just what an app does, but how it gets made! It’s been no secret that Steve Jobs is not a fan of Adobe’s Flash platform and he’s made sure that the iPhone won’t support the Flash Player. However, Adobe engineers came up with a pretty slick solution for their CS5 suite. With the upcoming version of Flash, developers will be able to export their .fla files directly into a binary that will run on the iPhone. This was set to be a great workaround and finally allow Flash developers to create content for the iPhone.

Unfortunately it seems Apple doesn’t approve of this either and stated that only programs originally written in objective C, C or C++ are allowed to link to their APIs. In other words, if you create your app in Flash CS5 and compile a binary for the iPhone, you have violated Apple’s rules and they can bounce your app.

The article at Engadget mentions that Apple would have to look pretty closely at your app to determine how it was made, but assuming Adobe puts some kind of header information into the file, it likely wouldn’t be all that difficult to determine which apps were created by Flash. Below is Apple’s official announcement:

“Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).”

Flash developers may not be the only ones left out in the cold by this move; developers that were using MonoTouch to create iPhone apps using C# could also run into trouble since C# isn’t on Apple’s “officially supported” languages list.

I’m sure this has a lot of developers asking the question: “Apple, why do you hate us?”