> I'm not sure what your references are, so let's discuss.

Sure. I did not put a wall of text because I thought the context was still clear but apparently not, fair enough.

* Adobe's CEO was far from compliant, fought as he could and pushed development up to the point where even he saw the writing on the wall:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/apr/29/adob...

Eventually they just cut their losses, without having put working versions for Android tablets or Windows Phone, and the implementations on Android and BlackberryOS having their own issues.

* Even by the end of its run on mobile, Flash had performance and stability issues:

https://www.wired.com/2011/11/adobe-mobile-flash-dead/

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/134551-why-flash-faile...

It was also the leading cause of crashes on OS X at the time. That was a big point when process separation for plugins was added to Safari:

https://www.macworld.com/article/198369/keynote-48.html

* It was also disastrous effects on laptops' battery life:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2010/11/the-future-of-notebo...

* I am not going to link stories on security issues (there have been tons of those all the time when Flash was used, so it's difficult to find some from around 2010), but I hope you agree on that one.

* To this day, there has not been any convincing argument regarding the lack of accessibility and bad user experience with websites that included Flash elements, or the privacy issues related to Flash cookies that kept appearing.

* I don't have a link offhand because the instance I remember was in Walter Isaacson's book, but there were several people saying that Adobe engineers had been pitching Flash for iPhone to Jobs, with demonstrations, for quite a while and never managed to solve the technical issues. It is completely untrue to say that Jobs was dead set against Flash from the beginning.

Overall, there is a summary of technical arguments here: https://daringfireball.net/2010/01/apple_adobe_flash

> At the time I was a full time flash developer, doing flex and flash on AIR.

At the time I was a student and relied on Flash for several things (websites we had to use for lectures, games, even some development in CS courses, etc). This may be why we seem to have wildly different perspectives. But I can assure you, Flash had been rubbish for quite a long time in 2009. It was buggy, crashy, notorious for turning laptops' fans the moment it appeared on a web page and sucking batteries dry.

> One day, Steve Jobs made an announcement that Flash was crapware and had to die for standards (sic!)

Come on, Adobe is and has been many things, but certainly not a champion of open standards. Apple's track record of supporting standards is stellar in comparison.

> I fully expected a rebuttal, but instead, NOPE: he totally and literally threw his product under the bus, on the world stage.

He really did not. He complained that it was unfair, threw a lot of FUD around (there even was that Flash evangelist telling Apple to go screw itself, and look into any post by Kevin Lynch from that time if you want more vitriol). They lead an anti-Apple campaign for about 2 years at that time. What he could not do is contest the technical points, because they were founded. If it were not for the Android community trying to convince itself that Flash was great because was not on iPhones, there would be absolutely no discussion.

Then, Flash for Android stopped in late 2011 (more than 18 monts after Jobs' letter, at which point Apple and Adobe had been talking about what to do with Flash for years). This would make absolutely no sense if its only issues were politics and Apple (it was still on pretty much any device on the Internet except for iPhones and iPads), and development stopped for all platforms around 2015. None of that is the kind of capitulation you describe.

> Flash was dead. Its replacement was said to be coming, and yet nothing good came out.

That much is right Web apps took a long time to improve.

> Javascript at the time was pitiful. Typescript didn't exist yet, and MVVM in HTML wasn't a thing. We were back to web 1.0.

Come on. None of the popular websites stopped functioning. All the things we associated with Web 2.0 worked just fine on iPhones and iPads. What we lost was games, which should not have been in a browser in the first place.