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I think you missed that the App Store is an iPhone afterthought -- the original, still supported, intent was to support HTML5 apps installed to your home screen.

You can write your own software, run it on any iOS device, share it with others, even sell it without anyone's permission.

Here is a PacMan style game, for example:

http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/257187093/pie-guy

If that's not "hobbyist" friendly, I don't know what is.

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It's an awful way to program. You don't get a choice of languages. There's no debugger. There isn't even an easily accessible console log to print to. It's like trying to assemble a watch, in the dark, while wearing mittens. You can do it, but it's not terribly fun.

There's a reason that there was a massive developer outcry at the "sweet solution" of HTML5 apps, causing Apple to release a native SDK instead.

You can actually attach desktop Safari's Web Inspector to both Mobile Safari and webviews running on a remote iPhone and get debugging, console logging, etc. The native stuff still has much better tooling, but the situation with webviews isn't as dire as you imagine.

Oh, that's nice! Looks like it's new with iOS 6. So, it was awful for a long time, but that is indeed a substantial improvement.

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