No, I'm pretty sure that's exactly the matter. Only Apple apps can multitask.
It's an understandable design decision, but it's certainly a parallel. (And to be completely fair it's changing, but you're being intellectually dishonest.)
But I think (my personal opinion, not backed by any data) that this was a decision based on technical matters. From the quoted passage it seems that Adobe was keeping the technology for itself to outpace competition. I don't think this applies to Apple using multitasking while developers can't.
It is not similar in the sense, that on iPhone you have some specific usage scenarios you can use with multitasking. On Android, it is open-ended, you can multitask for any reason you come up.
But that's iPhone apps, they were never intended or claimed to be truly open. Adobe is claiming they "openly published the specification" to PostScript, but they didn't. Compare that to a truly open standard like HTML5. Does Apple have a secret, proprietary API for that?
What they didn't publish at the time was Type1, as they wanted to be the gatekeeper for publishing T1 fonts (see similarity to Apple?). It didn't take long and T1 was reverse engineered, despite the obfuscation.