[jjoonathan]

I'm not sure I'd call it "candid" for Adobe engineers to blame their demise purely on Apple evil.

Anecdote: the Mac OS X dev tools used to come with an app called "Spin Control." It would sit in the background and every time an app failed to drain its event queue in a timely manner (causing the "spinning beach ball of death") it would sample the process and log the trace. One time I accidentally left the app open and forgot about it for a week. When I came back, I found thousands of logged events. All flash.

It popped up in different processes, because WebKit was embedded all over the place, but every single spin event had flash at the bottom. There were several different stack traces within flash, but they were all flash. Yes, I paged through them all. Yes, I thought the 100% figure was a bit suspicious, so I triggered a mail reindex just to see if Spin Control had somehow been configured to look only at flash or something. As expected, the reindex triggered a beachball -- and dropped sqlite into the Spin Control list. There was no filter skewing the results. Flash had literally been responsible for 100% of the beachballs over a week of document editing, email reading, web browsing, and generally typical user activity.

Point is: I find it credible that Apple saw flash as a limiting factor for their ability to deliver smooth UX and battery life, both inside and outside the browser.

[justsee]

Oh I agree with you. When I say 'candid', I mean they conveyed the sense they were sharing some internal opinion that it was entirely about Apple playing commercial games, when in retrospect I don't think that was correct – there were technical issues that made it a non-starter on mobile (battery, smooth UX as you say).