iPhone apps were fast and responsive on low end hardware precisely because apps were natively compiled and didn’t run in a VM. Did you ever try running Flash on early high end Android phones?
I 'm sure they were slow. but i m talking about the authoring tool and scripting language. I presume apple could optimize that to be fast natively. Judging from how HTML UI frameworks evolved over time, it's as if we ended up reinventing Actionscript
So what was Apple going to do during the first 4 or 5 years? Every single mobile platform that tried using HTML frameworks for their apps failed and were slow.
Blackberry, Palm, and Microsoft all tried it. Android itself was slow as molasses for years because of its dependence on a VM instead of a completely native stack.