It may have, but I doubt it was the primary motivation. Steve Jobs famously cared a lot about user experience, security and reliability. Remember that Apple under his leadership took a firm stance and loudly and publicly refused to allow Flash on its devices, despite the fact that many websites back then relied on Flash.

> Steve Jobs famously cared a lot about user experience, security and reliability. Remember that Apple under his leadership took a firm stance and loudly and publicly refused to allow Flash on its devices, despite the fact that many websites back then relied on Flash.

A less generous take on that would be that he/Apple also wanted to push their app store. At the time Flash was popular for publishing apps and games on the web. Yes their decision helped move everyone away from Flash but it also meant they would be getting their 30% cut from iOS apps.

Edit: I stand corrected. "While originally developing iPhone prior to its unveiling in 2007, Apple's then-CEO Steve Jobs did not intend to let third-party developers build native apps for iOS, instead directing them to make web applications for the Safari web browser." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(iOS)#iOS_SDK

You mean the same Flash that Adobe said they could have gotten to work on the original iPhone - with 128MB of RAM and a 400Mhz processor but barely worked on Android with minimum requirements of a 1Ghz processor and 1GB of RAM?

I wasn't claiming Flash was ideal in any sense -- just that it was popular back then.

>A less generous take on that would be that he/Apple also wanted to push their app store.

The App Store didn't exist at that time.

The original iPhone didn't even have an app store...

This is like saying that Apple can't collect 30% if you make your app in React Native rather than a purely native iOS app. It doesn't matter what technology you use, they're going to get 30% because they control the store.

Apple also planned to sandbox all apps. But developers wanted bare metal performance.

Sandboxes apps has to do with the permissions not having “metal performance”. iOS apps compile down to ARM native code. Unlike most Android apps that run on top of a VM.

the anti-flash stance was mainly there because of the abysmal performance a flash app would have on the device and the device's battery life.

Hence, user experience!