Apple tried very hard to support Flash on the iPhone. Apple flew out Adobe engineers to help them get it work on mobile. It was a tire fire and that's why Apple killed it. The dysfunction with Flash started before the iPhone, and arguably started with the acquisition of Macromedia.
It was already dying. Every web dev in the world hated it, and so did most of the users. But the worst offense was having proprietary closed source binary that couldn't be audited, running untrusted code on end devices. For instance, if you're on any OS other than Mac or Windows, you'd have a bad time, and often have no option to use flash sites (at the time, it was common to build flash sites even for simple document-style web pages). It was a security nightmare, but it was also a stability nightmare. When I saw Steve Jobs announcement I was so relieved. It was a bold move at the time, iPhone was nowhere near as dominant as it is today.
Apple tried very hard to support Flash on the iPhone. Apple flew out Adobe engineers to help them get it work on mobile. It was a tire fire and that's why Apple killed it. The dysfunction with Flash started before the iPhone, and arguably started with the acquisition of Macromedia.