the web has won for a lot, but the companies that want to own their ecosystem, and have learnt from their past mistakes. Mobile is a fresh start, and they specifically made it so that web is a 2nd class citizen.
Web is a 2nd class citizen because it’s designed for documents, not for interactive applications. All the application bits are afterthoughts and bolted on and it shows.
By the time mobile was established as a platform, the web is known to be an application delivery platform.
The fact that platform owners such as apple (or indeed any of them, not just singling out apple) did not make it first class is evidence that they prefer to own the platform rather than operate an open platform.
Microsoft, with windows, did not understand this at the time when they had huge advantage with win32, and thus did not lock down the windows platform. You see them trying now, with windows app stores (which i'm glad is not succeeding).
apple has more foresight, and decided to lockdown their app ecosystem. They deliberately removed flash as a form of application delivery, because they know that it can be good (if only adobe could pull their shit together).
The fact that the web still can remain, and that people still use it, is testament that even for a system being hindered, it provides enough value. Unfortunately, it just cannot complete against platform owners who would preferentially make their own native platforms better than web.
Apple actually wanted to have only web apps on iOS initially. They only published the iOS SDK after the outcry of developers, because web apps sucked so much.
I remember this well, as I was already developing with Cocoa on Mac OS X and was pretty disappointed in the beginning when there was no SDK for iOS.
PS: As Steve Jobs was good friends with Larry Ellison, I can imagine he truly believed web apps would be sufficient (as Ellison was a long time proponent of them already).
However I think while web apps can be „good enough“ [1] for many business applications (i.e. basically data entry and reporting), they weren’t good enough for what consumers wanted.
[1] I mean people still accept suffering from stuff like SAP
Google was and still is the canonical Web Company. Android went with Java and custom APIs over the web stack. More than a decade later and this hasn't changed. The new Android UI layer is Jetpack Compose - again, not the web.
At the same time, Palm decided to redo their own OS and they went all-in on the web stack. They even called it WebOS. Palm were a well known name with momentum and talented staff, but WebOS was a failure partly due to poor performance.
the web has won for a lot, but the companies that want to own their ecosystem, and have learnt from their past mistakes. Mobile is a fresh start, and they specifically made it so that web is a 2nd class citizen.