It was quite easy to do non-Flash development and hacking on the chumby if you wanted to, though admittedly there would then be no "market" for the app (not that Chumby really had any kind of market at all, you could upload community apps but there was no ability to sell them).

The chumby was basically just a small, touchscreen ARM based Linux system, before the raspberry pi made that cool (and super cheap). I've hacked on them quite extensively professionally (I was a chumby employee) and personally in Flash/haxe/C/Python and even golang, and lots of others outside the company did as well.

One of my favorite bits of work at chumby was helping NPR Labs (their director at the time, Rich Rarey, was a chumby fan) with this project:

http://www.npr.org/sections/npr-extra/2013/05/28/177751307/b...

The prototype for this was the bigger 8" chumby (the Best Buy branded one at the time), hooked to a braille reader. I wrote drivers for the braille reader and an ActionScript player extension (I've seen the source code to the Flash player and lived to tell the tale!) so they could interact with it from ActionScript code. You can see a photo of the older chumby-based version here:

https://sites.duke.edu/nab2012/2012/05/03/npr-demonstrates-t...

However, I'm also pretty skeptical that chumby re-imagined (without a serious shift in how it was targeted) would be successful if released today. The chumby (basically an Internet-connected alarm clock and radio and by the way, some random apps) made a lot of sense prior to the iPhone/Android revolution in smartphones, but not so much after that.