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That's a rather incomplete, revisionist and rose tinted glasses view of the history of native vs web apps in iPhone. As someone who built one of the first web
by reaperducer 2y ago
That's a rather incomplete, revisionist and rose tinted glasses view of the history of native vs web apps in iPhone.
As someone who built one of the first web apps featured by Apple, I can say that your view, too, is incomplete and revisionist.
A much more plausible theory
Theories are not necessary. Apple was very up-front about its trajectory with the iPhone at launch.
- hu3 2y agoup-front at launch doesn't prevent changing their minds when looking at world record revenue. what makes you think it was set in stone?
- kergonath 2y ago> what makes you think it was set in stone? It was not. But you got contradicted by people who actually remember what happened. It is fairly well documented, and was common knowledge even at the time. Jobs was initially sold on Web Apps for several reasons, and the state of iPhoneOS 1 and its internal APIs was very precarious and not stable enough for serious third-party development. Again, this was known at the time thanks to the jailbreak community, and it has been explained in details over the years by people who left Apple since then, and Jobs himself in Isaacson’s biography. When they pivoted towards the AppStore model, there was no predicting how big it would become, or even if it would be successful at all. The iPhone was exceeding expectations, but those were initially quite modest. It was far from world-record revenue.