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Just saw this headline off Techcrunch.  The essential problem is that Apple has shut off access of Flash being compiled on the iPhone type of devices.  It seems that Apple (or rather Steve Jobs in his perpetual paranoia that you can see in Pirates of Silicon Valley) is fortifying their castle walls by alienating everyone now that they feel they have a large enough platform.  It's funny because Adobe seemed to have been one of Apple's greatest allies over the years with many designers flocking to the Mac as a result of the better support with Photoshop, Illustrator and whatnot.  Now, Apple is giving the bird to them.

The great quote is from Lee Brimelow who states that Apple is exerting "tyrannical control over developers."

I find that quote to be quite ironic from a company that licenses one of the most expensive software packages around (i.e. Photoshop) and uses a non-open standard for development (i.e. Flash).

I mentioned Google in my title because they are the unseen hand in the background of this war.  But they are without a doubt another key player.  What the war truly is about is the battleground over standards and the souls of developers.  You could say there are at the moment five key players: Apple (iPhone/Objective C, Cocoa), Adobe (Flash), Google (Android, webkit, Chrome), Microsoft (C#/.NET/VB, Windows) and open source.  I think the casualties in this war will be not the companies themselves but the developers who are forced to continuously shift platforms as a result of the constantly moving target.

You could say that this is a good thing in some ways because it will present a great deal of opportunity for developers.  However, from my point of view, it's rather counterproductive of the last 10 years.  My reasoning is that the web has evolved into a solid platform and allows developers to choose the backend while browsers provide enough compatibility for developers not to have to go through extreme headaches over supporting every little detail.  The detail of the battle is that this is essentially the war of the mainframes (i.e. network/cloud systems) vs the PC/private portable device.  In other words, we're simply re-inventing the 80's and early 90's again, which is completely against the notion of good software development (i.e. reusability, economics, etc.)

If the end goal is to provide continuous job security for us developers, then by all means, continue these inefficient bickering wars.  However, I would like to see a model evolve and stabilize so that I'm not forced to re-learn a platform from scratch when my current knowledge allows me to support the same ideas.

In the end, it will be the developers deciding the fate of these players.  However, I really hope that the development community is able to speak vocally and get these pointy haired people away so we can focus on what our job truly entails: solving problems.  I'd rather be solving a new group of problems than re-solving a problem over and over.  And that's how I feel this war of attrition will lead us.