Comment by dwaite

It's important to understand the timeline of the Steve Jobs open letter on Adobe Flash - at that point the iPhone had been out just shy of three years, and before the first public betas on Android. So for nearly three years, Apple had been investing in HTML5 technology because Flash wasn't in a form where it was deployable.

Additionally, Flash required android phones with 256MB ram as a minimum (which would have precluded two of the three shipped iPhone models at the time) and at least initially only supported software video decoding. Because of the difference in screen dimensions, resolutions and interaction models (plus the issues with embedding due to RAM limitations), the website was still basically broken whether your mobile phone had Flash or not.

My understanding (based on the timing) was always that when Adobe was finally ready to push its partners to bundle mobile Flash, Apple looked at it and decided against it. Adobe made public statements against their partner and so Jobs did so in kind.