Edit: sorry I made you angry. I didn't know that people are still sore about Flash. My memories of it were that it was buggy, made my computer overheat and crash.
And now we have giant js bundles composed of thousands of little libraries, ad hoc animation, subpar media playback.
The web stack wasn't prepared to match the ease of authorship and distribution of Flash. It still isn't up to the same par, and it's been 15 years.
If Adobe had open sourced the entire standard and the player itself early on, they'd still have the best authorship tool and would have done amazing things. I don't know what they were thinking. They had an awesome tool, but their strategy was so wrong.
Flash was like PHP. Admittedly not the prettiest, but people did amazing things with it. It was a tool that worked for a lot of people. Teenagers were using Flash and getting really good.
Steve didn't want Flash eating his batteries, so he killed it on Apple. He also left us with the fucking robber barron App Store and the concept that we can't run stuff or upgrade our own devices. Seems like Apple shouldn't be able to dictate what you can or can't run on their platform - that's monopoly power. They killed Flash.
Steve was worse than Flash and stole from us.
There are good reasons to hate Flash, but that decision was an obvious strategy credit: they were going to kill Flash anyway because they wanted to prevent cross platform runtimes and toolkits on iOS, in order to fully control the platform and not be commoditized. Same reason why they banned JIT, in order to prevent Java/C# being used (it took a long time for these platforms to adapt and even today they are not widely used, maybe except for Xamarin, but even that is marginal compared to Objective-C/Swift).
Javascript was also slow back then, Chrome/V8 were only launched in 2008 and reached phones only years later, yet JavaScript based websites were used on smartphones.
I'd be curious to see a comparison of site performance now, Flash vs a bog-standard HTML + JS + animations site. I think they would be quite similar.
Also computing power increases with time, so this is a silly reason to kill off a feature.
There is one and only one browser engine on iOS, the one that Apple makes. Everyone and everything has to use it.
Secondly, they can hobble it at will, just like they're doing now with progressive web apps. We've had progressive web apps for how long? 5 years? Safari still doesn't really support them.
I wonder why? Might it have to do with the business selling tens of billions of dollars of platform-specific applications each year? Nah, that can't be! :-)
What killed Flash is much more dull and prosaic: it cost a lot to develop & maintain, and wasn't making as much money as Adobe would've liked.
[0]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C270SViXAAAzTLh?format=jpg&name=...