No. That is the MAIN reason Flash isn't on the iPhone, it is the number one crashiest program on the Mac.
How is the battery life? That's another big concern with Flash on a mobile device.
A good Flash programmer can make very good Flash movies that don't perform like crap, but good Flash programmers are very rare.
A lot of people hate flash because of all the low-quality crap that is made with it, and shoved down people's throats through websites, but if you replace Flash with something else, you can bet your life that there will still be a lot of low-quality crap, made by non-programmers, that will be shoved down your throat and slow down your browsing experience.
Non-optimized flash apps are indeed a problem that Adobe can't really fix. But the problem is multiplied by Adobe's god-awful implementation of flash on non-windows machines.
For comparison, it's interesting to see that there's a new "browser war" concerned with optimizing the javascript performance, and the results of that are pretty impressive and to the benefit of all. If Flash had been a more open standard and there would have been competing Flash players, we could have seen something similar there, a race to improve the Flash player performance to in turn make the browsing experience better.
But it's proprietary, so the only thing that motivates Adobe is the fear of being marginalized.
What rumors are you referring to here? Or is this more unsubstantiated anti-Adobe gossip?
The big problem isn't HTML5 itself, but what people make in it. Most of the crap HTML5 sites out there are made by graphical designers who have no knowledge about programming, and typically only test their creations in isolation on their own machines. When that thing is then released, it is actually displayed on some webpage together with lots of other HTML5 elements and other HTML5 ads, and the whole thing slows to a crawl because none of it was optimised.
A good HTML5 programmer can make very good HTML5 movies that don't perform like crap, but good HTML5 programmers are very rare.
A lot of people hate HTML5 because of all the low-quality crap that is made with it, and shoved down people's throats through websites, but if you replace HTML5 with something else, you can bet your life that there will still be a lot of low-quality crap, made by non-programmers, that will be shoved down your throat and slow down your browsing experience.
What if Apple's C/C++ compiler (i.e. gcc) just doesn't optimize as well as Microsoft's (which, from my experience, it certainly doesn't)?
Let's not forget that it was Adobe who tried to firmly establish SVG (and burned a lot of money in the process). I for one can't blame them for investing where content creators and the users are.
I don't think they pull other Apps just because they consume battery. Crashes also shouldn't be a concern on the iPhone because apps are shielded from each other (or so I would hope).