Then Apple effectively vetoed - explicitly and through lack of investment) futher improvement in audiovisual web platform technologies (e.g. the custom shaders that Adobe wanted to make part of the nextgen filter spec) during the critical period where developers were making their platform choice for mobile.
Apple has been no friend to the further evolution of the web.
It was bloated, buggy, slow, and by far the single biggest vector for malware. Like, by orders of magnitude. Not to mention being a proprietary black box that didn't interoperate with the rest of the web stack, and toxic to accessibility.
If Flash were genuinely a beloved technology that everyone but Jobs wanted to keep, he would've lost that battle sooner or later.
And Apple has absolutely been a friend to the further evolution of the web. Killing Flash was, in fact, necessary for the further evolution of the web. Now we have HTML5 with widely-compatible methods of doing everything Flash used to do and much, much more, that you don't have to install anything else to use. It's all built right into the browsers (or, at least in many cases, the webviews!), and thus also gains the benefit of the browser/OS vendors' security reviews.
Nobody really wanted Flash. It was expensive to develop for, had a bunch of security issues and was generally bloated.
