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Chief executive Shantanu Narayen told a conference call earlier this week that having evaluated the new SDK for Apple's mobile platform, Adobe believed that it could develop a Flash player itself.

But in a subsequent statement, Narayen changed his tune.

"Adobe has evaluated the iPhone SDK and can now start to develop a way to bring Flash Player to the iPhone," he said. "However, to bring the full capabilities of Flash to the iPhone Web-browsing experience we do need to work with Apple beyond and above what is available through the SDK and the current licence around it."

Put simply, the SDK enables third party developers to write applications for the mobile devices. But Flash is much more than an application and even if Adobe does produce a working version, it will have its work cut out persuading Apple to install it as part of the core software.

Apple chief executive Steve Jobs has already said that he considers the full version of Flash as too big for the iPhone (even fully fledged Macs can get bogged down by it sometimes) while Flash Lite, the current mobile version, is not powerful enough.