Flash on the Wii, as I recall, worked well mostly for flash games that were designed with the Wii in mind, and for very simple interstitials. Anything more complex did not work well.
I think Adobe could have done something similar on the iPhone. I don't know that it would have been what people wanted, and I think it would have exposed some of the iPhone's hardware limitations to users.
Mostly though, I think Flash was a heck of a lot better than what we have today with overly-complicated webapps and Electron, as you referenced. That's the point I was trying to make—we've ended up with something even less efficient than Flash ever was!
If games were designed to target a specific platform, doesn’t that lose some of the benefit of a cross platform runtime?
Of course the iPhone hardware had limitations at the time. The iPhone OS was very optimized around its known limitations and it aggressively killed apps from running that drained battery life or used too much memory (and it still does).
Native iOS apps are very efficient. Now the thought of running apps in a Java virtual machine on a phone in 2008 like Android did wasn’t a great idea. The best thing that Apple did was help rid the world of Flash.
Flash on the Wii, as I recall, worked well mostly for flash games that were designed with the Wii in mind, and for very simple interstitials. Anything more complex did not work well.
I think Adobe could have done something similar on the iPhone. I don't know that it would have been what people wanted, and I think it would have exposed some of the iPhone's hardware limitations to users.
Mostly though, I think Flash was a heck of a lot better than what we have today with overly-complicated webapps and Electron, as you referenced. That's the point I was trying to make—we've ended up with something even less efficient than Flash ever was!