The iPhone didn’t necessarily kill flash, but it made the fact clear that consumers were rapidly moving away from browsing the internet on their computers, to other devices such as phones, tablets and TVs.
Adobe made money selling the expensive Flash creative suite, which web designers would only continue to buy if flash player had a high market penetration.
In order for flash to live on, Adobe would have had to port their proprietary flash player to every single internet enabled device, and then beg/bribe every single company to include flash pre-installed on their devices.
The business model was clearly unstainable, so Adobe killed it.
