Then they lacked the imagination. The Facebook app would have become a web browser where Facebook controls user auth, contacts and then payments. Big $$$
As soon as any Facebook app convinced a user to pay, all other facebook apps would have a seamless checkout.
Getting user financials isn't easy but we've seen the rise of Venmo, Robinhood, and Neobanks since then so it's doable.
Desktop penetration is lower outside of the US. Aren’t Internet cafes still a thing in much of the world because people don’t have computers at home?
Latest anecdote (this week) is not seeing internet cafe's in Belize and government PSA's say to contact them on whatsapp.
That said, Facebook makes their money in rich countries.
Not on iOS where that sort of thing is prohibited. Sure they could put a skin over safari, but apple would have banned the entire FB app as soon as they found a developer's app they didn't like.
Yes.
A phone not supporting flash might get developers upset. But by that time developers wanted html5 to take over and developer preference doesn't push product.
One can make the case that the most inexperienced with computers person is Apple's ideal customer / most profitable. Not being able to get on facebook would push this demographic to other phones.
You also have to remember even as late as 2011, Motorola was trying to sell the Xoom tablet as being able to browse “the real internet” because it (belatedly) supported Flash.
But then we still get back to the fact that in 2008, the iPhone 3G had 128MB RAM and couldn’t even fully load a regular web page. When you scrolled to fast, there was a checkerboard while it tried to render the rest of the page. It definitely couldn’t do any complex animation within Safari.