Flash was a dumpster fire on MacOS. Apple probably would have supported it on the iPhone if Adobe had stopped it from crashing apps and made it performant on Apple's primary platform at the time (the Mac).
I remember pulling up crash logs for people showing them that Flash was in every one of the Safari crashes the wanted me to fix. I told them it was out of my hands.
No, they didn't. It was straightforwardly unsafe and broken, the heaps of effort that went into supporting it were largely just to paper over that fact. It's no accident that the other browser vendors went along with dropping support so quickly after Apple did.
The reason given for blocking Flash on iOS at the time was it's too cpu intensive on mobile, which impacts battery life. Not that it was "unsafe and broken".
The main reason other browsers stopped supporting Flash was websites stopped being built with Flash because iOS didn't support it, and a lot of people thought that mattered even though iOS had (and still has) a small market share world-wide.
> He cited the rapid energy consumption, computer crashes, poor performance on mobile devices, abysmal security, lack of touch support, and desire to avoid "a third party layer of software coming between the platform and the developer".
Sure, he's laying out a case for the app store they'd later introduce, but it wasn't simply CPU and battery. There's a reason I cited crash logs as the primary thing I remembered about how it affected me. It gave me an immediate reason to share with people about why I couldn't fix Safari crashes when Flash was involved, which made that aspect of my job easier to explain.
I remember pulling up crash logs for people showing them that Flash was in every one of the Safari crashes the wanted me to fix. I told them it was out of my hands.