AFAIK, this is completely false. There was never a webOS-type proposal. Where do people come up with this stuff?
Digging in, it seems like they worked on Chrome for several years before moving over to Edge. That would give them at least some technical insight into what happened at Google, if not the reasons behind those decisions.
Even so, it still feels like a lot more speculation than actual facts.
But that's me.
Alex Russel, a developer, team lead and developer advocate for Google for 13 years from 2008 to 2021. He's one of the primary people responsible for the web components mess.
He's quite well known in hte web/web-adjacent world. During his work at Google he would:
- go out of his way to blame and gaslight Apple for everything
- defend and any and all Chrome-only non-standards that Chrome was (and still is) churning out at ever-accelerating rate, completely ignoring any and all standards processes, or other browser vendors' input
- be completely silent on "how Google killed mobile web" and only blaming Apple
Once he went to work for Microsoft he started bashing Google, too.
The amount of grains of salt tyou need to take to read anything he writes that is not strictly technnical would cause world-wide salt deficit for any forseeable future.
"Initially, third-party native applications were not supported. Jobs' reasoning was that developers could build web applications through the Safari web browser that 'would behave like native apps on the iPhone'"
Once it became clear the phone was desirable enough for telcos to leave it alone, he pivoted to what would give him even more control.
Even after the 1.0 release Apple went back into death march development mode to polish up a usable SDK. Even that first SDK had a tiny surface area compared all the frameworks available on the OS. It wasn't until iOS 3 that the SDK felt fully functional and not polished until iOS 4.
Web apps were a stopgap. Early iOS was just barely above an advanced demo in terms of quality and functionality. A lot of frameworks didn't even have stable APIs to release for third party developers.
Also, like, the forced carrier apps on every generic phone before the iPhone either ruined or crippled the experience of using the phone, locking you into their shitty ad-laden applications or forcing you through their terrible browsers and web portals.
To me, and several people I knew at the time - It was one of the big appeals of the iPhone that Apple had drawn a hard line at not allowing any of this.
It was 100% actually better for the consumer.
Only later was the decision made to ship a public SDK. Web apps were announced because that's the only thing third parties could use. There was no public API to speak of, just a collection of internal APIs and one-offs in individual apps.
Ex. If you can't run the Android or iOS YouTube app, what you have left is the web one... which could be amazing, but is hardly a fully functional PWA because Google would rather you used the native app.
Firefox OS would have failed all the same had it been based on Qt, or even if it was based on Java without the Android runtime and SDK.
Source not really it was a vibe at the time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1nwLilQy64
and
https://www.cultofmac.com/125180/steve-jobs-was-originally-d...
Whether it's revisionist history or not, there were later claims that Steve Jobs knew they couldn't have a native platform ready when the iPhone was first announced so they stalled for time to a) get the App Store ready and b) see what types of app ideas were popular to get those platform APIs finalized. The interim solution was web apps with recommendations to look at the Dashboard APIs in Mac OS X (which were basically web apps).