stevenf:

Slightly longer version of a tweet from this morning:

Apple makes the iPhone SDK. They’re also one of (if not the) biggest contributors to WebKit.

WebKit’s capabilities continue to grow exponentially. I’m blown away by what can be done with it today. If development continues apace (and there’s no reason to believe it won’t) it seems realistic that within a reasonable amount of time it will be possible to create web apps that feel exactly like native iPhone apps.

All Apple would have to do to close the loop completely is expose a few extra things to WebKit via JavaScript. And therein lies my question.

Apple makes money from the iPhone developer program, and the sale of iPhone apps. They do not make money from WebKit apps.

As the major benefactor to both the iPhone and WebKit, does this present a conflict of interest within Apple?

To put it another way, if WebKit begins to present a serious threat of undermining the app store ecosystem, it appears to be in Apple’s financial interest to hobble WebKit development. What would you do if you were Apple?

Alternatively, they expose things to WebKit only at the pace that people are comfortable with—people are not exactly ready across the board for their browser to have access to Address Book data—and at some point in that process enable web apps to have app representation in the AppStore (just like native apps, but perhaps in a WebAppStore which I wrote about before) and participate in the micro-payments ecosphere. That would allow them to continue their rapid WebKit innovation without it sabotaging native apps.

That’s one theory anyway.

Source: stevenf