A lot of people forget this, but it's true: Apple didn't want _anyone_ to be able to make native apps on iOS except themselves. That they changed their minds and helped devs make a ton of money tends to erase this fact of history.
Apple knew that there would be huge pushback against a walled garden appstore with Apple in absolute control, and huge pushback on them taking a 30% cut. So they started with "just write web apps". But of course, they also inexplicably made the first iPhone 2G only! Flagship phones that shipped many months before the iPhone had 3G. Why cut that particular corner, and not any others in their otherwise $$$-is-no-object new wonderphone?
You can do a much better job hiding low bandwidth and high latency in a native app, especially since app assets get downloaded once (probably over wifi) at app install time. So by essentially making app developers beg for access to their native platform, they radically reduced the anger at their wildly locked-down appstore and their 30% cut.
And it seemed a little suspicious how quickly they were able to deliver a 3rd-party SDK and developer documentation.
This has been one of the go-to plays in Apple's playbook since the very beginning. Steve Jobs was always opposed to Macs having any form of user-upgradable parts [1]; he wanted people to buy a brand new computer every time theirs became obsolete. As it happens, this occurred almost immediately after the Mac 128k's launch (almost no 3rd party apps supported it). The first generation iPhone was an exact repeat!
[1] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Diagnostic_Port....
30% was pretty offensive after years of shareware.
But then apps came along costing a small handful of dollars. They also did things you could not do on your PC due to the connectivity, the camera and the sensors. Everything changed when it came to price expectations.
How much of this is explained by needing an SDK and developer documentation for internal apps? (That is, had Apple not built an App Store, it would have been all the more important to make sure Mail, Maps, Safari, the built-in YouTube app, etc. were high-quality.)
In part I'm curious if the engineering culture was that reasonable-quality docs were expected for internal developers.
Also, keep in mind, in the timeframe that is relevant here, the only apps were Mail and Safari. Apple making Mail a native app from the start was another tell that "you should just build web apps" was disingenuous.
Apple basically needed a take it or leave it strategy for the first release.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything about no kinds of third party applications on ios at all
I'm sure I forgot a few. All attempts failed quite completely.
You forgot BlackBerry, who failed themselves spectacularly by becoming a patent troll.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190228/17170141697/black...