As a web developer, I've never believed Apple has hindered web development on their platform, purposefully or not. [...] As I see it, their focus is on the user, which is why they've been slow to adopt APIs that are privacy concerns, or drain battery, or have other negative implications.
As another web developer, I find this entirely unrealistic. Apple's QoI even for popular new features like the HTML5 media elements was a bug-ridden mess for years before they fixed even basic problems. Conveniently, having managed to break the de facto standard for serving video on the web that had been working for years up to that point (Flash players), that left native apps as the only reliable way to do a lot of even quite simple things you might want to do with multimedia content. There is a deep irony that some of the breakage was because they were playing those media elements through effectively a separate plugin of their own that wasn't properly integrated into Safari and consequently broke other basic web behaviours like cookies.
At this point, the idea that Apple's motivations for the constant breakage and even severe regression of web functionality on iOS devices are entirely altruistic and for the benefit of their users is about as credible as Google and Facebook lobbying for privacy regulations because they want to decrease tracking on the Internet.
Just to be clear, Apple didn't kill Flash, mobile killed Flash.
I don't think that generalisation is warranted.
Apple refused to support Flash at all, meaning everyone who wanted to provide (among other things) audio/video content had to switch to the nascent HTML5 functionality, which was at that time and for some years afterwards inferior to Flash in almost every way except availability.
In that situation, it made little sense to invest in better Flash support on Android as it was presumably seen as a dying technology. However, there was no inherent reason why Flash couldn't have been improved to use less battery in the same way that the browsers themselves were, or that Flash could not have taken advantage of better hardware support on mobile devices for computationally expensive tasks like video decoding as this became available with newer devices.
This revisionist history, of seeing people wanting the proprietary Flash to come back, is crazy.
There's nothing revisionist in saying that people wanted A/V content on their sites, that Flash player had been by far the dominant way of providing that content up to that point, or that the then-new HTML5 alternatives were also very poor in quality and performance on mobile for several years afterwards.
Remember how for several years everyone with iPhones couldn't watch the videos on a lot of websites, and how excited people were when the big video hosting sites started adding HTML5 players and, in time, support for better codecs? Probably many of those people had no idea what Flash or HTML5 even were, so I don't suppose they did "want Flash to come back", but they certainly weren't happy that they couldn't watch videos on websites like everyone else.
As another web developer, I find this entirely unrealistic. Apple's QoI even for popular new features like the HTML5 media elements was a bug-ridden mess for years before they fixed even basic problems. Conveniently, having managed to break the de facto standard for serving video on the web that had been working for years up to that point (Flash players), that left native apps as the only reliable way to do a lot of even quite simple things you might want to do with multimedia content. There is a deep irony that some of the breakage was because they were playing those media elements through effectively a separate plugin of their own that wasn't properly integrated into Safari and consequently broke other basic web behaviours like cookies.
At this point, the idea that Apple's motivations for the constant breakage and even severe regression of web functionality on iOS devices are entirely altruistic and for the benefit of their users is about as credible as Google and Facebook lobbying for privacy regulations because they want to decrease tracking on the Internet.