Having Flash on iOS, even through the browser, would have allowed people to develop apps for iOS without going through Apple. It would also allow trivial Android porting. Flash was not in Apple's strategic interests.
It was a risk not supporting Flash in 2007, one that has paid off in Spades. Apple made the right choice for Apple.
In retrospect, Macromedia would have needed to open source Flash, and aim it as a viable open web standard circa 2007 or 2008 (making it even more difficult for Apple to reject). This would have required starting the process in 2003 or 2004 at the latest. But IE6 was still dominant in 2003/2004, Firefox's success was far from assured, and open web standards were a joke.
The original iPhone was amazing in 2007, it was really a game changer for the open web. I don't think Macromedia could have anticipated the reasoning behind the death of Flash in 2003, never mind make the contemporary case to save it...
The real question I have is: Has Adobe ported their Flash dev tools to produce HTML5/JS/CSS? Are they as good the Flash version, and do they provide most of the same features? I ask because that shift has been foreseeable, and should have been a top priority (to minimize the rise of alternative platforms).
Adobe opened some parts like a compiler they were working on and the Flex SDK but Flash was not opened, this was a mistake, I mean they announced a few years ago that HTML is the future so why not put a few people work on Flash code, remove the parts they can't open and make it open source, similar with Open JDK. It is weird they support AIR but Flex was donated to Apache.
I agree, but look at electron apps, the situation is not better, Flash is similar to a game engine so it had a "game loop" running at a certain FPS. I coded AIR apps, and I know Flash was misused in websites but we have same misuse now with JS where sites with text and images don't work without JS, You had the option to turn off Flash but can you afford to turn off JS>
Adobe is at fault, they should have open source it or make improvements/
It was a risk not supporting Flash in 2007, one that has paid off in Spades. Apple made the right choice for Apple.
In retrospect, Macromedia would have needed to open source Flash, and aim it as a viable open web standard circa 2007 or 2008 (making it even more difficult for Apple to reject). This would have required starting the process in 2003 or 2004 at the latest. But IE6 was still dominant in 2003/2004, Firefox's success was far from assured, and open web standards were a joke.
The original iPhone was amazing in 2007, it was really a game changer for the open web. I don't think Macromedia could have anticipated the reasoning behind the death of Flash in 2003, never mind make the contemporary case to save it...
The real question I have is: Has Adobe ported their Flash dev tools to produce HTML5/JS/CSS? Are they as good the Flash version, and do they provide most of the same features? I ask because that shift has been foreseeable, and should have been a top priority (to minimize the rise of alternative platforms).