"Apple's original position on third party apps..." To add some necessary context, Apple's position on almost everything is "what we are currently doing is best

"Apple's original position on third party apps..." To add some necessary context, Apple's position on almost everything is "what we are currently doing is best" (and from that "what our competitors are doing is wrong" or "what you wish it did is wrong"). Building a whole native development platform, curation system, etc, is a massive undertaking, so with the first device Jobs unsurprisingly pitched their current state as ideal. And as they adopted new choices, those became the new ideal. Any who read too much into Jobs various sentiments that could best be expressed as sales pitches might be going astray.