It was also disallowed from publishing flash apps in the app store. Once the developers left it was as good as dead IMHO and all that kind of content moved to mobile.

Definitely. I remember at the time Adobe Air was still recently new and there was some buzz around in the tech scenes because everyone like Balsamiq Mockups, which originally was only in available in Adobe Air.

Then Apple announced they weren't going to support flash and overnight everyone realized flash was dead, and Air and Silverlight were both a dead end.

I was working on a Silverlight product at the time and it got canned soon after too, with Microsoft soon losing enthusiasm for it too.

Some oldies from here:

2007 - Steve Jobs saying Flash is bad for video:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=130496

2008 - John Gruber being prescient about Apple banning flash compiler:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=320431

2010 - Apple bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler (2nd comment thread is pg saying he's against it ideologically):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1250799

This is untrue. Apple attempted to ban all third-party development tools, but never actually enforced the rule due to the threat of a lawsuit from the FTC. They dropped the rule about three months after Jobs' famous "Thoughts on Flash", but the fact that developers still remember the ban is probably a good chunk of why people forgot about the exporter.

That was much later and too late for flash.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/08/05/ftc_believed_to_b...

Flash abandoned their own product only after it wasn't allowed on iPhones anymore.