[musicale]

Steve Jobs' "sweet solution" (web apps) for iOS was derided by developers when he announced it at WWDC 2007. But Apple had included a bunch of useful features (touch controls, native-like widgets, javascript canvas, etc.) in mobile Safari so that web apps could be usable and useful. Apple preferred javascript web apps to flash or java apps, which were seen as power-hungry and sources of security flaws. Fast forward to today and you can have a cloud game streaming client (such as Xbox Cloud Gaming, GeForce Now, or Amazon Luna) running as a web app in Safari.

One reason Apple was cautious about third party apps was the concern (from both Apple and carriers) that iPhone features would be misused or the iPhone itself might become unreliable or unusable. So when the App Store was rolled out the next year, apps required approval from Apple and were restricted to running in a sandboxed environment. (Background execution was also forbidden at first due to concerns relating to responsiveness, memory usage and battery drain, as well as security and privacy.)

[musicale]

I think I misstated efficiency concerns for flash/java/etc. influencing web apps; efficiency was more likely a driver toward statically compiled, native apps in objective-C (at the time) such as Apple's own native apps on the iPhone.

Ironically in 2026 many "native" apps on desktop and mobile are basically wrappers for web apps.