Steve Jobs is finally getting what he wanted from developers back when the iPhone was released: web apps being developed instead of native applications.
Developers love the SDK, web apps are obviously-less capable than native applications, but there's no approval process for web apps. That's what this has come down to: it doesn't matter how good the platform is if you can't distribute.
The app store, like the music store, makes a little over breakeven. All Jobs really cares about is selling more phones -- the rest is just to support this primary goal.
Right, but that's exactly my point. The native apps are fueling sales of the phone. The Apple ads don't say "10,000,000 web apps available online," they say "100,000 apps available in the app store." So I'm not seeing how Steve Jobs can possibly have wanted developers to create web apps all along?
He's referring to the fact that when the iPhone was released, Jobs strongly played down the importance of a native SDK and played up the idea of making iPhone-centric webapps. It was some months before they released the native SDK.
This is what I meant. Web apps are becoming important again not because there's no SDK but because the SDK is effectively unusable for some applications.
Developers love the SDK, web apps are obviously-less capable than native applications, but there's no approval process for web apps. That's what this has come down to: it doesn't matter how good the platform is if you can't distribute.