> Given Apple's general money-grubbing ways (see: the App Store), this is somewhat surprising.
Far be it from me to give Apple credit for altruism or openness, but this narrative isn't quite true. When the iPhone launched, Jobs and the execs at Apple envisioned that web apps would be the way the iPhone functionality could be extended. There was even a relatively straightforward way for web apps to be cached and saved on the Home Screen. The desire for compatability with open standards was even reflected in Jobs' open letter explaining why Flash would not be put in the iPhone.[0]
Public outcry for the native APIs along with prodding from other Apple execs led to the App Store becoming a thing.
> When the iPhone launched, Jobs and the execs at Apple envisioned that web apps would be the way the iPhone functionality could be extended.
Doesn't pass the sniff test, because
> Public outcry for the native APIs along with prodding from other Apple execs led to the App Store becoming a thing.
Apple's vision of web apps was as second class citizens to Apple apps. The outcry was because those web apps, despite caching and saving and other things could not and would not ever be able to do what an Apple app could.
Sherlocking/f.luxing/Dark Skying (maybe less so, the last) is bad enough as it is, but far worse when those as web apps could never do what an Apple app could (f.lux is a perfect example, there was, and I could never imagine a world where Apple would allow a web app to control color temperature on their phone).
Far be it from me to give Apple credit for altruism or openness, but this narrative isn't quite true. When the iPhone launched, Jobs and the execs at Apple envisioned that web apps would be the way the iPhone functionality could be extended. There was even a relatively straightforward way for web apps to be cached and saved on the Home Screen. The desire for compatability with open standards was even reflected in Jobs' open letter explaining why Flash would not be put in the iPhone.[0]
Public outcry for the native APIs along with prodding from other Apple execs led to the App Store becoming a thing.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20100501010616/https://www.apple...