It's easy to blame Apple for this stuff, but fundamentally Steve Jobs' complaints were fair and I think it was a matter of "when", not "if" Flash was going to die.
I just do not believe it. It was the best available rich presentation/interaction game in town. Trivial to get started and no need for a platform to sign off on your work.
No doubt there was a never ending litany of security problems, but if Flash had been available at the birth of smartphones, I suspect it would have flourished. Or even led to a competitor targeting the same space with better characteristics.
There were performance issues too, and it was pretty bad on Android phones, at least when I used it in 2012.
I think it might have been able to live on in the form of Adobe AIR if Adobe hadn't given up on it. I think AIR could have occupied the space that Electron does now.
Totally. I still think that more development can cover a lot of sins. Look at JavaScript. It started for changing text colors or something. Now it is one of the fastest interpreted runtimes.
Years of incremental improvements on this bustling platform could have made Flash into a performant beast.
Anyway, we will never know what could have been if Flash had been a mobile option on day one.
No doubt there was a never ending litany of security problems, but if Flash had been available at the birth of smartphones, I suspect it would have flourished. Or even led to a competitor targeting the same space with better characteristics.