iPhone Web vs Native Apps

At the time Apple killed flash and announced the iPhone, they claimed they had no intention to support native apps on the iPhone. Web apps were the future and if developers wanted their app on the iPhone they should make a web app.

This is not true at all. Jobs didn't include Flash on the iPhone because of its performance requirements.Apple didn't realize how important the App Store would be to the device's popularity when the iPhone initially launched. It appeared that the intent was to keep it a closed, curated platform where only Apple and its partners could ship products for it. This was the strategy that they had established for third party iPod clickwheel games.In fact, Apple initially raved about how great

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.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.

For what it’s worth, Apple didn’t go the app route to begin with. They were all in on web apps on the iPhone, and had no plans to allow native app development until developers demanded it. The iPhone didn’t have native app support until around a year after it’s release. They thought browsers had the capabilities necessary to make web apps mobile friendly enough to fill the need at the time, but that was overly-optimistic.

This is completely false. You're forgetting the original iPhone did not have a native SDK - the original plan was for 'apps' to just be web apps. It was only a year later that the SDK was released after the huge demand for one, so claiming that they didn't initially support flash to drive people to an App Store that didn't exist is incorrect.

Apple did plan to make web apps first class on iPhones. But changed their minds when developers complained about not getting hard metal access. Maybe they thought that supporting web apps would get them more apps, but developers gave them apps for free and it allowed Apple to have a monopoly. Microsoft tried the same with their phones but somehow failed... Google went the web app route on ChromeOS with decent success. Mozilla tried with FirefoxOS but was too early - FirefoxOS is now very popular

That's not true. The original iPhone didn't have an App Store. Jobs was all in on Progressive Web Apps and thought the future was going to web applications that ran natively in Safari. That's why he initially wanted things like Flash to work on iPhone. He didn't give up on that until Adobe called his bluff and major developers refused to move to mobile. He very begrudgingly introduced the App Store in the next iOS version after he realized that they needed it.

Apple's love for native apps began - if I remember correctly - with the popularity of jailbroken devices and third party app stores like Cydia that could unleash the full potential of iPhone 1. Until then, Jobs was stubbornly against giving developers access to the native ecosystem and preferred that they develop web applications. I wonder if browsers would be full-fledged VMs by now if we had continued along the web application trajectory.

It's worth noting what Steve Jobs said at the introduction of the iPhone:"The full Safari engine is inside of iPhone. And so, you can write amazing Web 2.0 and Ajax apps that look exactly and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone. And these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services. They can make a call, they can send an email, they can look up a location on Google Maps.And guess what? There’s no SDK that you need! You’ve got everything you need if you know how to write

I would bet money that Steve Jobs never intended to actually have web apps as the only type of apps on the iPhone.Their native SDK was probably just not ready yet for the release and they knew about Android which they wanted to beat to market.