Actually you have evidence of that? Cause I don't believe that for a second. I was a member of the ADC at that time. And I don't remember seeing ANYTHING about a iphone (this was before it was renamed to ios) dev kit.
But my email was full of guidelines to create web apps for the phone. What I think happened is that (at that time) Apple wanted Mac developers to make iphone apps, badly. And mac dev's wanted to do it natively. A half a year later, I see the beta of the dev kit.
I doubt Apple imagined the app store market at that time. And like most grand success stories, there was a lot of luck involved.
Evidence of what? You seem to concur that native sdk and app store did not exist at the time when Apple said Web Apps are good enough.
Sure they didn't wanted to lose developer attention and had to keep them engaged with web apps etc. until they figured out the strategy on native development and the app store.
And I can't believe that Apple had totally closed the door or hadn't thought about native apps at all when they initially released the iPhone - there wasn't any sensible reason not to - it wasn't a new thing, at least some of the phone platforms had native apps and there were even App Stores before that. It was just a matter of time.
Looking at the 2007 WWDC press release, it looks like Web apps was they way Apple seriously wanted to go: "Developers can create Web 2.0 applications which look and behave just like the applications built into iPhone, and which can seamlessly access iPhone’s services, including making a phone call, sending an email and displaying a location in Google Maps." If nothing else, it gave them a much larger potential developer base than relying on native development alone and by sticking to standards it insures that the iPhone would always have a place in the table.
But my email was full of guidelines to create web apps for the phone. What I think happened is that (at that time) Apple wanted Mac developers to make iphone apps, badly. And mac dev's wanted to do it natively. A half a year later, I see the beta of the dev kit.
I doubt Apple imagined the app store market at that time. And like most grand success stories, there was a lot of luck involved.