For years people have been complaining about the lack of IOS flash support, but the true impact has been to hasten the move to HTML5 and to kill a proprietary, bloated, bug-filled technology.
Had others not made such a big fuss about it, Apple's mobile devices would simply silently not support Flash. But everybody made such a big stink about it so they had to vocally explain their motivations for not supporting Flash specifically, making Apple some kind of Flash opponent.
For years (even after iPhone shipped) Adobe only had "Flash Lite" to offer, and allowed it to lag many versions behind desktop version (e.g. Opera on Wii had trouble when YouTube started dropping support for Flash 7 and Adobe simply didn't have anything more modern available in "Devices SDK").