Bruce Lawson
5 HN mentions · mentioned in 5 months, 2022–2026
2:18 · 4.8K views · Sep 15, 2021
A two-minute clip of Steve Jobs at WWDC 2007 introducing the plan for iPhone third-party apps as web apps built on Safari and Ajax. It shows the original vision before the native SDK and App Store.
HN cites it in platform-power and PWA debates as proof that Apple originally wanted the future of apps to be on the web.
5 comments from Hacker News
> By all means, force Apple to open things up, but in the same stroke ensure that there's no uneven enforcement that could allow other corporate giants to expand their monopolies where they previously couldn't. Well-met, I agree wholeheartedly. Mirosoft, Google and Amazon all deserve to abide by the same rule-of-law. > There's a lot of support for breaking Apple's iron grip on software distribution on iOS for example, but practically none for breaking Google's iron grip on the web Well... yeah. If I want to publish a website today, I can buy a VPS and a domain name and have it broadcasting my personal believes by the end of the day. Pretty much everything on the web is working as it should, besides it's monetization model. Google's "iron grip" on the web mostly boils down to Chrome, which isn't terribly broken. Without a good App Store to deliver software, browsers had to adopt technology quickly to compete. That's what birthed things like web notifications and WebRTC, both of which are arguably quite good for the development of the web. Hell, Steve Jobs himself[0] said that he wanted the future of applications to be on the web: Apple was the one who chose to neglect Safari's featureset, which ultimately led to Chrome being superior. Apple definitely has the money to compete, but they choose to drag their feet through the mud because webapp parity with native applications would bleed their App Store profits dry. > ...even though the latter is arguably far more dangerous since
> Was it? Yes. Here's a quote for you from the original WWDC 2007 iPhone launch[0]: _"We've come up with a very sweet solution. An innovative new way to create applications... it’s all based on the fact that we have the full Safari engine in the 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 guess what? There’s no SDK that you need!"_ > I think one of IOSs strength is its operating system one of the OS' strengths is its OS, cool > and proper native apps not what we're talking about here at all > PWAs are inaccessible, bloated, slow and awkward to use. literally the opposite of all those things [0]: this video
Amongst others, probably referring to: this video and [LINK] Whether it's revisionist history or not, there were later claims that Steve Jobs knew they couldn't have a native platform ready when the iPhone was first announced so they stalled for time to a) get the App Store ready and b) see what types of app ideas were popular to get those platform APIs finalized. The interim solution was web apps with recommendations to look at the Dashboard APIs in Mac OS X (which were basically web apps).
> Apple has never been big on the web. That may be true today, but I don't think it was true during the early days of the iPhone, where Steve Jobs wanted no third-party native code running on the iPhone, only web apps that connect to third-party services.[1][2] It wasn't until lots of developer backlash and subsequent success of the App Store that they decided to de-prioritize the web. [1] this video [2] [LINK]
Kind of close. Here was the relevant portion of the actual iPhone announcement by Steve Jobs saying all you needed to write great native apps for iPhone was ajax and web 2.0. There was no mention of "app store" in the speech: this video