Adobe announced on Monday at the Adobe MAX conference that Flash Professional CS5 will support creating rich, interactive applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The company demoed during the MAX keynote using Flash CS5 to export apps for the iPhone. Adobe said it leverages the same source code used to deliver applications across desktops and devices for Flash Platform runtimes – Adobe AIR and Flash Player 10.

“We are going from the Flash platform down to the native iPhone APIs and compiling that way,” Heidi Voltmer, Group Product Marketing Manager of Adobe’s Creative Solutions Business, told The Loop. “We have some innovative engineers on the Flash team and they have been able to come up with this solution.”

Adobe highlighted several iPhone apps from BlueSkyNorth, Bowler Hat Games, Breakdesign, FlashGameLicense, Muchosmedia, PushButton Labs and South Park Digital Studios, using the Flash CS5 Beta. In fact, some of the apps are already available from the App Store.

While the iPhone apps were built with Flash and not Apple’s iPhone SDK, Adobe said they are native iPhone apps. “We made sure we focused on Apple rules. We believe we are in full compliance,” said Voltmer.

Adobe didn’t know whether Apple was aware the apps were originally made with Flash, saying it was up to the individual developers to submit the apps to the App Store.

Adobe said it is submitting other iPhone apps to the App Store, including a version of its Web conferencing solution, Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro.

The fact that you can compile a Flash application into an iPhone app doesn’t mean that Flash now works on the iPhone. Those are totally separate issues.

“We know that iPhone users want Flash on the iPhone,” said Voltmer. “There are 3 million iPhone users month coming to our site looking for that functionality, but we don’t have anything for them yet.”

A public beta of Flash Professional CS5 is expected to be available later this year, the company said.

“We think this benefits Apple and the end user,” said Voltmer. “I have an iPhone and I’d like to have more options for apps. All these new developers are a boon for Apple.