I remember this spat clearly.
At the time Kevin Lynch was Adobe’s CTO and came out with a pretty strong (and IMHO totally insufficient) rebuttal of this memo.
Fast forward 3 years and he jumped ship to join Apple’s on the Watch project, where he still holds a VP of Technology position.
I don’t know who, inside Adobe, was working as a fifth column for Apple, but they definitely made the Flash people realize they had to leave the ship to sink and move on.
With the knowledge that Apple actually tried to get Flash on iOS and didn't half-ass the attempt, I'm inclined to believe Jobs that it was technical decision. Flash was everywhere and Apple had to says something to 1.) explain why iOS didn't have Flash, and 2.) convince developers to drop Flash so iOS web browsers wouldn't be a second class citizen.
Looking at all the effort poured into Ruffle, I think the death of Flash was inevitable.
Adobe's fifth column was Adobe. The entire management structure, top to bottom.
The thing that actually killed Flash wasn't the iPhone, but the Premium Features nonsense they tried to pull a few years later. Adobe saw Unity trying to add Flash export and found a way to lock it behind a revshare[0], but it pissed off so many Flash developers that they backed down. In revenge they cancelled AS4 and FPNext work that otherwise would have been a good opportunity to bring Flash to mobile devices in a way that didn't suck.
I suppose you could throw all of that on Kevin Lynch, but it's not like he continued sabotaging the Apple Watch after-the-fact. I suspect it's more the overall system that Adobe was: an engine to buy up other people's products and extract revenues from them.
[0] Specifically, you could not use both AS3 domain memory (Flash's answer to WASM) and Stage3D (Flash's answer to WebGL) at the same time without having a digital signature from Adobe in your SWF that they would only give you if you opened up your books to Adobe and paid a portion of revenues out of them to Adobe.
Ok sorry but I just don't believe you, nobody cared about the HTC Dream. Android didn't hit mass market until the Motorola Droid (and all those other Android phones that came out in late 2009).
