Sure thing. Apple told developers that webapps were the solution. They didn’t give any public indication that this would change. Now, one could argue that this

Sure thing. Apple told developers that webapps were the solution. They didn’t give any public indication that this would change. Now, one could argue that this was just cover while they got the native SDK ready, but that Bertrand Serlet email from the other thread was the point at which they even officially decided to have a native SDK at all (months after telling devs to write webapps). I think the real issue is with the phrase “Apple planned”, because Apple is not one person, and the people disagree on “the plan”. We mythologize them sometimes as an all-planning “the Vatican thinks in centuries” kind of organization. But as emails like that one and others show, there are often legitimate arguments within Apple. In this case, some folks[0]were arguing that native apps would be too much of a security nightmare to be worth it, and that anything that needed to be native could just be built by Apple themselves. So in conclusion: “Apple” planned nothing, some people at Apple had clear plans to push through a native SDK from day zero, and some people at Apple spent months being deadset that that would never happen. [0] I’m too lazy to look up these sources right now, check out Melton and Ganatra’s multi-part interview on the Debug podcast.