Adobe’s chief technology officer, Kevin Lynch, has posted a defense of Flash technology to the company’s blog area. Lynch’s comments are aimed at criticism of Flash as a technology absent on the iPhone and iPad.

“We are ready to enable Flash in the browser on these devices if and when Apple chooses to allow that for its users, but to date we have not had the required cooperation from Apple to make this happen,” said Lynch.

Lynch didn’t provide further details about what cooperation Adobe needed to make Flash work on the iPhone OS platform.

Lynch pointed out the irony of Flash’s absence on the iPad, as the software was originally developed in the 1990s as a vector-based drawing application for a pen-based operating system called PenPoint, which ran on graphical tablets.

Apple’s “walled approach” to blame

Lynch claims that Apple is the only major manufacturer of smartphones not working with Adobe to get Flash Player 10.1 working on their platform. He cited efforts in progress with Google, RIM, Nokia, Palm “and many others” to get the technology working on phones, tablets, netbooks, and televisions equipped with Internet connectivity.

He also took a swipe at Apple’s App Store, referring to a “walled approach, where a manufacturer tries to determine what users are able to see or approves and disapproves individual content and applications.”

“We strongly believe the Web should remain an open environment with consistent access to content and applications regardless of your viewing device,” said Lynch.

Addresses Flash crashing and performance issues

Lynch said that Adobe doesn’t ship Flash with any “known crash bugs,” and suggests that while Adobe will “work to resolve any real issues,” he attributes such reports to either “an upswing in incidents” or “a general piling on.”

Critics say that Flash’s performance is sluggish and that its processing is inefficient on the Mac. He said that Flash Player 10.1 makes significant improvements in this area by using Mac OS X’s CoreAnimation technology and optimized video rendering that reduces CPU usage “by half.”