Mostly time and hassle I would imagine. Apples requirements also shifted in the meantime so you might also be forced to provide more info/pictures/etc. which again comes down to time and hassle.
It's a real cultural loss.
Meanwhile, the Wii’s web browser supported Flash, and the Wii is a lot less powerful than an iPhone.
The first iPhone that came out with those spec’s was in 2011.
- Android itself really sucked at this point in time.
- Android and iOS in 2010 couldn’t run complex web apps either without chugging. It really had to be native code to perform well.
Cross platform frameworks like the initial poster alluded to always suck compared to native purpose built frameworks.
We see that today with Electron - a battery killing, memory inefficient, platform.
Flash on the Wii, as I recall, worked well mostly for flash games that were designed with the Wii in mind, and for very simple interstitials. Anything more complex did not work well.
I think Adobe could have done something similar on the iPhone. I don't know that it would have been what people wanted, and I think it would have exposed some of the iPhone's hardware limitations to users.
Mostly though, I think Flash was a heck of a lot better than what we have today with overly-complicated webapps and Electron, as you referenced. That's the point I was trying to make—we've ended up with something even less efficient than Flash ever was!
Of course the iPhone hardware had limitations at the time. The iPhone OS was very optimized around its known limitations and it aggressively killed apps from running that drained battery life or used too much memory (and it still does).
Native iOS apps are very efficient. Now the thought of running apps in a Java virtual machine on a phone in 2008 like Android did wasn’t a great idea. The best thing that Apple did was help rid the world of Flash.