The plan was always web apps, they're vastly more secure than any other option. That's a significant part of why safari for windows ever existed.

The problem was developers just wanted to write native apps, presumably believing that the only secure apple platform would be converted to the Mac-like experience, complete with malware, etc.

So with no one making actual web apps, in part because the web standards of 15+ years ago were not as powerful, and in part because developers all thought web apps were bad, and ongoing "we want real apps" noise, you got the initial UIKit APIs, which lacked _a lot_ of functionality, and made a lot of things very hard.

Or you can just go all conspiracy theory and say "they would never change their plans in response to market pressure, who would do such a thing?"