There’s a ton of back-and-forth about why Flash isn’t on Apple’s iDevices (and all that implies about Flash, Apple, “open” standards, etc.) lately. And being steeped in both the Flash platform and Apple products, I’ve watched the debate in its various forms very carefully.

Today, Steve Jobs issued an open letter on the subject of Flash, and it’s somewhat telling. Many of the points are merely interesting, debatable or even sometimes unclear. But what seems very much to the point is this paragraph:

“In addition, Flash has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it. Adobe publicly said that Flash would ship on a smartphone in early 2009, then the second half of 2009, then the first half of 2010, and now they say the second half of 2010. We think it will eventually ship, but we’re glad we didn’t hold our breath. Who knows how it will perform?”

So, for all the time (a few years now) that Adobe has pushed or expressed interest in or hoped for getting Flash on the iPhone and now the iPad, it’s failed to get a reliable, non-Flash lite version of the Flash player on any of the other mobile platforms that would welcome it with open arms. If that changes soon, with Android or a Google-powered tablet, would Apple reverse course?