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I think the Oracle v. Google lawsuit (regarding Android’s use of Java) validated Jobs’s intuition that it wasn’t a great idea to have somebody else’s proprietary programming language as a first-party API.

If Java had become the primary language for Cocoa, the path to Cocoa Touch and an iPhone App Store could have been much more complicated.

Java bridge only existed because at first Apple wasn't sure if the Object Pascal/C++ developer community would embrace Objective-C.

When most of them rushed to adopt Objective-C, there was no reason to keep two stacks around, specially when they were still in the red, bleeding money.

Did you use them?

I tried to and have _very much_ the opposite opinion about the ease of use.

Yeah, 1000% this. The Java bridge was a catastrophe, and Objective-C worked beautifully with Cocoa.

Oh there were rough edges but mostly because they abandoned them quickly but being able to use a great IDE to write code and have it all autocomplete was way better than having xcode open and the docs trying to figure out the APIs was painful.