I can assure you that the iPhone as originally announced was never going to allow third-party native apps; it was to be web-apps only forever, and this was not intended to be a temporary position. Even though their language was often cagey, it is my clear recollection that Apple's general attitude around/beyond the release of iPhone OS 1.0 was that web-apps were essentially "as good as" any native app could be, and were therefore everything developers would ever need. As I recall it was some 13 months before they finally relented and began to talk native third-party API access.
I was at WWDC 2007, here's what Jobs said at the time -
"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."
Additionally -
Apple board member Art Levinson told Isaacson that he phoned Jobs “half a dozen times to lobby for the potential of the apps,” but, according to Isaacson, “Jobs at first quashed the discussion, partly because he felt his team did not have the bandwidth to figure out all the complexities that would be involved in policing third-party app developers.”
No it was not 13 months, it took 4 months from WWDC 2007 to announcing the SDK, which was then released another 5 months later.
Jobs was being slippery because they had nothing to show at WWDC 2007, but here is the timeline:
iPhone revealed: January 9 2007
WWDC 2007: June 11 2007
iPhone released: June 29 2007
SDK announced: October 17 2007
SDK released: March 6 2008
App Store opens: July 10 2008
From the iPhone being announced to the App Store opening was about 18 months total, quite a pivot if "iPhone as originally announced was never going to allow third-party native apps; it was to be web-apps only forever, and this was not intended to be a temporary position."
It was always Jobs' M.O. to trash-talk any important feature(s) they didn't have at any given time. It was and is a valid marketing technique -- I can't really blame him for employing it -- but at some point it stopped fooling me. It required me to assume that Jobs was a dumbass, which regardless of what we might have thought about him was never the case.
From the iPhone being announced to the App Store opening was about 18 months total, quite a pivot if "iPhone as originally announced was never going to allow third-party native apps; it was to be web-apps only forever, and this was not intended to be a temporary position."
As I understand it, the App Store had been under active development for some time, but for the iPad. The iPad was always going to run native third-party applications, but the company was caught off guard by the demand for them on the iPhone.
In retrospect, the apparent speed of their pivot on the App Store policy should have been a very strong indicator that a tablet was in the works. It did look suspicious, but I don't think Jobs was actively lying when he said the iPhone would rely on web apps.
I might be mistaken, but my impression was that the "web apps only" thing was real and not a temporary compromise. They may have spun it that way retroactively, though.
