I think the entire 'web apps' thing was lying dodge for Steve Jobs until they were actually ready to put out a real API with iPhoneOS 2.0 . The iPhone 1 in many ways was rushed, and once they saw how much traction it got, iPhone 2.0 opened the floodgates.
API v1 was hacky and rushed and it changed a lot in v2.
Nah, the hype on webapps was huge at the time. Even when native apps appeared on mobile and were on another planet of performance, a lot of people insisted webapps were the real future. That’s the movement that eventually gave us Electron and similar runtimes. This goes all the back to the late ‘90s, see for example this influential essay from Spolsky in 2004 [0]: “The new API is HTML, and the new winners in the application development marketplace will be the people who can make HTML sing.”
If anything, the steer to traditional native development was a classic example of Jobs being ready to deny everything he had sworn on until a minute before, just because he had found a new option that was more favorable to his profits.
API v1 was hacky and rushed and it changed a lot in v2.