• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, September 9, 2010

After coming under fire for its tightly controlled approach toward iPhone applications, Apple Thursday lifted the ban on the use of third-party development tools in apps. That move appears to open to the door to Flash, the popular Adobe software which Apple had blocked from mobile devices as an unreliable and inferior programming language.

In a brief statement issue this morning Apple said that to make the App Store even better by "relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps, as long as the resulting apps do not download any code. This should give developers the flexibility they want, while preserving the security we need."

The company also said it would issue App Store Review Guidelines to help developers better understand its vetting process, long criticized as cryptic and arbitrary. Here's the full release.