alt Hacker NewsEven Apple, before caving in, didn't want apps. On the original iPhone there was no SDK, Jobs' "sweet solution" to expanding functionality was web apps pinned to the home screen.
Everyone complained, loudly, and they caved in and launched the app store.
The complaints at the time were entirely valid. The state of web development for mobile was pretty dire. HTML 5 wasn't released until 22 January 2008. People wanted to build apps for iOS in XCode. Nothing else would have been acceptable.
IMHO the web community dug their own grave here. WAP/WML and whatever it was the Japanese phones used was a better starting point than HTML etc as they'd already solved a lot the big problems around mobile developement. They were not perfect and support was terrible but they were much more focused on the problem of mobile app development than the "everything is the same nail" approach of HTML.
Even to this day the UX experience of web apps in HTML/Javascript/CSS is subpar to native apps and I say that as someone who spends their day developing such web apps. You can only put so much lipstick on the pig.