[chc]

He explicitly said in the iPhone launch that the intended way to create apps for the iPhone was to make a website:

> 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 apps using the most modern web standards to write amazing apps for the iPhone today. So developers, we think we’ve got a very sweet story for you. You can begin building your iPhone apps today.

I remember a lot of jokes in the Mac developer community at the time about what a "sweet story" this was. It seemed like the public SDK was a response to jailbreak apps being more popular than the intended "iPhone Web apps."

[jharger]

I'm not debating that he said that, I'm just suggesting that it was a marketing ploy, either to buy the teams some time to iron out the details with the app store, or some clever product strategy to release the app store later (which was hugely popular when it did come out)

...but then I don't know, I wasn't there.

[hi5eyes]

funnily enough there were webapps that jailbroke your ios device with ease