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I seem to recall flash being power-hungry, slow, and a security nightmare. All of those things would be bad for iOS.

Remember how in the early days it was a "big deal" that android phones supported flash but iOS didn't? Tech people used to think that was important, and it netted android some sales, but in the end everyone had to admit that it was kind of a bad idea.

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Flash was a complete security nightmare.

However, as a platform the player was lean and optimized. A lot of people wrote horribly inefficient things with it, which gave it a reputation for being power hungry and slow.

There were additional performance issues on Mac desktops where certain APIs for video playback were blocked.

I was on Android back then. Flash was important since I could use certain web sites I could not use on iPhone.

Today things are different since most site use html5 instead but back then iPhones were seriously crippled on the web.

So was I. While you could use a few of those sites, the device was clearly not happy about it, getting really warm, or just crashing sometimes.

Shortly after, most of those sites released normal mobile versions anyway.

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