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
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_SDK#History
https://9to5mac.com/2011/10/21/jobs-original-vision-for-the-...