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Comment by jonny_eh | Hacker News Reader

> They only grudgingly accepted HTML because it was unavoidable

IIRC, Jobs was against an App Store and pushed for people to install web apps on their home screen. Only after huge demand did they develop the locked down App Store, which was a far bigger success than they expected. I'd bet a dollar that is the only reason why they're as well supported as they are to this day.

Source: https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/07/10/the-revolution-st....

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My read is that their APIs weren't ready in time, so "make a web app" was a stop-gap they tossed out to developers while they were preparing UIKit for its 1.0 release.

Apple internal emails from the period have been released as court evidence. They didn't make the decision to create a native SDK until 4 months after the iPhone was released (by this time there was already jailbreak sideloading available) https://nitter.net/techemails/status/1400270458608664577

In another email it seems like before the device was released the need for a native SDK was considered only as a stopgap until HSDPA was fast enough to make web apps good enough (the original iPhone was EDGE only) https://www.techemails.com/p/scott-forstall-emails-steve-job...

There has been quite a lot of reporting on the origins of the iPhone since then, and from that work it is clear that they really did not intend to allow native apps on the phone. They had to reassign resources to make it happen in a hurry once they changed their mind, which resulted in shrinking and delaying that year’s OS X release.

That wasn't the main reason though - UIKit v1.0 was pretty barebones not because they needed more time, but Jobs vetoed work on it for so long because he genuinely thought native apps were a bad idea.

This is correct and has been forgotten.

"You don’t want your phone to be an open platform. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up." -Steve Jobs 2007

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