Steve Jobs was responsible for it's death, and his true motive was clear: he wanted to force as many people to buy through his App Store as he could.
He knew it would be a long time before HTML5 could compete in the then known as "Rich Internet Application" (e.g., anything other than text and videos). So where did iOS users need to go to get that "Rich Internet" experience without Flash? Apps. And that necessitated them buying them through the App Store. Which Steve Jobs got a nice 30% cut of for each purchase.
End of story.
P.S. It didn't help that Adobe is lazy/incompetent. And Flash DID run on iOS - Kevin Lynch personally demo'd it at Adobe MAX sometime around 2008/9? I was there. He announced they were working with Apple to get Flash Player on iOS. We all knew ol' Steve would never allow that to happen.
We all would have been better off if someone had bought Flash Player rights, or come up with something open-source to replace it, and get all the browser vendors onboard with it as a standard. Instead, we have a limited replacement (HTML5/JS) that is still catching up.
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Steve Jobs was responsible for it's death, and his true motive was clear: he wanted to force as many people to buy through his App Store as he could. He knew it would be a long time before HTML5 could compete in the then known as "Rich Internet Application" (e.g., anything other than text and videos). So where did iOS users need to go to get that "Rich Internet" experience without Flash? Apps. And that necessitated them buying them through the App Store. Which Steve Jobs got a nice 30% cut of for each purchase. End of story. P.S. It didn't help that Adobe is lazy/incompetent. And Flash DID run on iOS - Kevin Lynch personally demo'd it at Adobe MAX sometime around 2008/9? I was there. He announced they were working with Apple to get Flash Player on iOS. We all knew ol' Steve would never allow that to happen. We all would have been better off if someone had bought Flash Player rights, or come up with something open-source to replace it, and get all the browser vendors onboard with it as a standard. Instead, we have a limited replacement (HTML5/JS) that is still catching up.