There's no reason web couldn't continue to be a powerful app platform with full device API access. Rust+WASM+device APIs and you could have Google Maps and Netflix be "native" web apps.
Apps were just an excuse for Jobs to own the iPhone platform. It's why they killed Flash - they didn't want a cross-platform way to develop apps and marginalize their plans.
There's easily half a dozen cross-platform frameworks for developing mobile apps. Most emit native code and others target WebKit views.
As for Flash, Jobs didn't want it on the iPhone because the Flash was a shit show. When the iPhone was released Flash Player 9 (with ActionScript 3 and the AVM2) had been out for a year. A vast majority of Flash content was using the older and much shittier AVM1. That content was also 100% developed for WIMP interfaces so there were zero affordances for multitouch or even just having hit boxes sized for fingers instead of cursors.
Even if Steve Jobs loved Flash and ached to have it on the iPhone most content available would have been designed for a minimum of SVGA screen resolution, a cursor, and a desktop processor and RAM and would have not been running in a JIT runtime with zero understanding of app restore states or any iPhone features.
Flash Lite was not a good option either as it did not support web content or run as a plug-in. It also did not have good touch support since most phones it was targeted for didn't have a touchscreen. It was number pad and hardware keys almost exclusively.
So there was very little overlap between the goals of the iPhone and any aspect of Flash. Flash on Android basically proved Steve Jobs right as to the performance of Flash on a smartphone. The UX ended up terrible for most content, it absolutely killed the battery, and its security problems were myriad.
Flash's problem was it sucked anywhere but the desktop. Even then it sucked on laptops as it was a major power drain and/or fan spinner. HTML5 obviated Flash for most of its use cases. Even Adobe eventually realized that and last their Flash authoring tools target HTML5.
The difference is that Apple put a lot of time and effort into making old content work. They wrote dynamic JIT compilers for JavaScript, sliced up webpages into GPU layers, downscaled old content to fit on tiny screens, changed the behavior of hovers so that you could use them with a finger, and added detects for undersized tap targets and form fields. Adobe's approach was to shove all that compatibility work onto the developer. Why make a JIT for AVM1 when you could just make a new version of ECMAScript and make everyone rewrite their movies in AS3? Why embrace GPU rendering and composition when you can just hand people a thin wrapper around OpenGL and tell them to use Starling Framework? Why bother fixing broken hovers when you can just throw more events to the developer to handle?
Like, imagine if Steve Jobs went up on stage and told people that the iPhone would run webapps, but only if people wrote everything in Angular and WebGL. That's kind of what Flash Player was trying to do. Apple knew that you had to get the existing, broken, not mobile-friendly-at-all content up and running first and they they could push through more mobile-friendly web standards. Adobe figured they could just entice developers into writing not-terrible Flash movies and then they'd be allowed on smartphones again.
For every good use of Flash on web pages there were dozens of UX abortions. Flash sites were rife with mystery meat UIs. They were also accessibility hostile. While you can commit a lot of the same sins on a web page you have to go out of your way to do so.
Besides all of those problems it was also a closed platform like the GP was decrying with Apple's App Store. You can make a web app entirely FOSS with entirely FOSS tools and served from a completely FOSS stack. If you want to avoid any platform lock in it's entirely possible. Flash was the literal opposite until years after it's mobile availability was a meaningful concern.
This is nonsense as initially Apple was pushing web apps, it actually took a lot of convincing to get them to move to native code. Flash never provided a good user experience.
The only reason they released a year earlier than their native app SDK was to get their product out in front of competition that they knew was coming so they could claim they were "first".
Who was coming? What competition?
They weren't in a race with anyone to release the iPhone. Nobody was even close to what they had with iPhone at the time.
Android didn't start at Google. Google bought them in 2005, three years before the iPhone was released.
https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/05/24/android-was-born-on...
The exact UI doesn't matter anyway. Apple knew they had something and they knew Google had resources to compete. Don't forget that these companies compete over hiring talent as well.
Apple never, ever planned on only web apps and there's no evidence of that.
The first third party native apps were people who managed to get the gcc toolchain to emit a binary that the iPhone could run.
Then the App Store came out a few months later. Native apps caught on very well over just making html5 sites for iPhone users, because, in a lot of cities, AT&T's network just couldn't support all the users' very well. Even then, you were limited to a max of something like 20 (?).
I'm wondering why Mozilla, amongst other companies, hasn't taken action against this anti-competitive behaviour.
(I realise this is a controversial opinion but I don’t lament the slower feature release cadence of Safari because IMHO the web is already far too complex and feature rich for its own good.)
It's just a very strange argument for justifying Apple abusing its users for search engine revenue.
Web developers don't just use 1 or 2 mobile devices they own. They develop with desktops where they could use Firefox. They test with desktops or emulated Android devices where they could use Firefox. They find ways to test Safari even if they don't have anything that can run it. They used to find ways to test IE even if they didn't use Windows.
Bringing Gecko to a new platform is much harder than wrapping WKWebView.
They are all behaving anti-competitively in different ways, and they should all be looked at!
Now Google has much less influence over web standards. Instead of shaping the web to fit the needs of its own products, Google would need to work with whatever the browsers decide to allow.
Independent Chrome, for its part, wouldn't be able to advertise itself all over Google properties for free, and would need to find ways to fund itself. They could strike their own search deals, or maybe even start charging users. Either way, they'd be on a much more level playing field with e.g. Mozilla.
They killed flash because it was a bug riddled, security nightmare, owned by Adobe, (one of the greediest corporations in existence). I will never understand the flash nostalgia, good riddance.