Apple boss Steve Jobs has played down his company's public rift with Flash maker Adobe.

Hostility between Apple and Adobe has been brewing for months, after the iPhone maker effectively banned apps created in Flash from its mobile devices. The flames were fanned when Jobs himself published an open letter, criticising Flash as a buggy battery hog, while Adobe has accused Apple of exerting tyrannical control over developers creating programs for the iPhone and iPad.

We didn't start off to have a war with Flash or anything else

Speaking at the All Things Digital conference in California, Jobs took a less aggressive stance towards Adobe. "We didn't start off to have a war with Flash or anything else," he said. "We just made a technical decision."

Jobs was speaking just a week after Apple overtook long-time nemesis Microsoft to become the world's largest technology company by market value - an event unthinkable a decade ago.

"For those of us that have been in the industry a long time, it's surreal. But it doesn't matter very much, it's not what's important," Jobs said. "It's not what makes you come to work every morning."

iPhone - the movie

Apple is widely expected to unveil its latest iPhone next Monday, when Jobs delivers his keynote address at its developers conference in San Francisco.

Consumers may already have gotten a sneak peak of the next iPhone after a prototype, famously lost by an Apple employee at a bar earlier this year, was purchased and displayed online by a technology blog.

Jobs said there was debate about whether the phone was simply picked up after being left at the bar, or actually stolen out of the employee's bag. "This is a story that's amazing," Jobs said. "It's got theft. It's got buying stolen property. It's got extortion. I'm sure there's sex in there somewhere. Somebody should make a movie out of this."

if he didn't want a 'war' all he had to do was keep his mouth shut,

Either way, if Adobe releases a more reliable/less resource hungry version of Flash that Apple is happy with then there'd be no reason for Apple to hold off on it's inclusion in future revisions of it's products.

The argument about "quality" etc is just a smokescreen IMHO If apps made by Adobe software are that bad the public would vote for the higher "quality" "official" apps.

It's not just the actual flash interpreter that is "bad". It's the apps the end users make using Flash that don't have to be vetted.

I thought and I may be wrong, that Apple banned the use of third party software to create apps that are then submitted to the store?

Jobs didn't want flash on the iphone/touch now iPad because it would interfere with the revenue from the appstore.