Well, you're right. He couldn't introduce the mobile web because there weren't any sites that offered a non-WAP mobile version, because no one could be surfing with mobile Safari when iPhone was first announced. But it was still Apple and web developers that caused this third Internet scourge, the mobile web, after the first two Internet scourges of Flash and Javascript.
It's understandable that a mobile user may want to conserve their data using the mobile versions of websites. What is anathema is Apple giving web developers the ability to force mobile site versions for mobile devices even after the user intentionally chooses to view the desktop site. A lot of sites won't respect that choice without something like &desktop=1 attached to the URL, and often as not even with it. Imgur is one that even if you do get the desktop site to load initially, it will immediately go back to the mobile site once you click to another Imgur page. Slashdot, also, makes it a real pain to not view the mobile version from a device.
I'm not sure if you're missing the fact that when Apple released the iPhone in 2007, they also released web developer code to create html "apps," but also released mobile Safari specific html that, in effect, created the mobile web. What I'm griping about is that the mobile web is an annoying and dysfunctional Third Scourge of the Internet. You seem to think it had nothing to do with Apple, but Apple unleashed it on the World Wide Web, and Steve Jobs ran Apple at the time. Did you not know the source of the mobile web? Apple under Steve Jobs is where it crawled out from under.
Apple did not release that, it was third party. The notion that in allowing the web to be used on phones Apple became responsible for all web apps faults is ridiculous.
Apple ushered in the mobile web. It was Apple's solution to the delay of the iPhone SDK: Web Apps.[1] That is exactly what created the non-WAP mobile web, which began in 2007 coinciding with the announcement and release of the first iPhone. What third party could have such influence over the entire WWW? None. It was Apple, it was only Apple, and it was entirely Apple that created the non-WAP mobile web that everyone loathes. Every mobile web site uses the tools that Apple created for web apps. And they all look the same.
This is just ridiculous. No mobile web site ‘uses the tools that Apple created’ as these mere samples were barely functional and showed controls that were superseded in iOS 7, almost a decade ago.
That article you quickly googled is whining about how Apple promoted web apps as a stopgap solution because they didn’t want or couldn’t allow third party native apps, and the jailbreak community did a lot of the hard work. It doesn’t say Apple created web apps, Steve Jobs is to be held responsible for mobile web apps or whatever your ridiculous claims are.
Oh and there’s approximately 0 people loathing the fact that the WAP mobile web no longer exists and has been replaced by the current web apps. It stunk, nobody used it because it was useless.
Here is your argument: "This is just ridiculous." It's known as argument from ignorance, and it is fallacious argument. You can't say why I'm wrong, you just think I'm wrong and can't prove it. Because I can't be proven wrong, because this is how it happened, and it is accurate history that the mobile web as we know it today sprang from Apple's agenda for mobile Safari browsing from the seeds of their Web App bullshit.
Fundamentally, Web Apps had nothing to do with iOS7. It was html. It was javascript. But most importantly it was design specifications. It was teaching web developers "for a small screen, you have to make everything big big big. Use this menu design, and make elements giant so users can see them on their tiny phone," completely forgetting that the killer feature of mobile Safari was pinch and zoom, which every single other mobile browser copied. So these design specifications for mobile versions of websites, which were completely unnecessary, took on a life of their own. At first they were just lists. They looked nothing like the full site, they were just lists of hierarchical forms using iPhone menus in html. It became more annoying from there, but it all started with Apple showing web developers how to do it, and everyone wanted to tap into the iPhone user base, so they made these shitty Apple design specified mobile websites that are terrible and constrictive and some of the worst design because it was homogeneous. All the mobile sites looked the same.
Then they gave web developers the ability to prevent a mobile Safari user from using its its one killer feature, namely, zoom. Apple gave web developers the ability to disable zooming into a paragraph or a picture. You must view this page only how the OCD web developer decided you will view it. And its still being used to this day. There are countless sites that mobile Safari can't zoom into elements on, and the result of this is copy that can't be read on such a small screen. At the other extreme is text so large lines can't fit across the screen.
WAP certainly sucked, but it didn't get in the way of the actual WWW. You had to intentionally go to a WAP version of a site. After Apple, 2007, no more! We will detect your mobile browser and force you to the mobile web whether you want it or not. And good luck defeating it, because any link you click, we'll detect your mobile browser again and keep stuffing you in the shitty hole of the mobile web versions of websites.
I, for one, would be happy if I never saw another mobile site again. It's unnecessary, absolutely unnecessary in 2023, even when browsing over cellular, it is no longer necessary, yet it persists for no reason, by the ignorance of web developers that think someone prefers to see a broken, dysfunctional, inoperable version of the web site they're trying to view but aren't allowed because decisions are being made for them.
The mobile web all began with Apple and iPhone and the delay of the iPhoneSDK, and Web Apps. And we're still living with this flawed and defective paradigm now from any mobile browser, which again, if it was once needed to save the cost of cellular data, it stopped being needed years ago, and yet the detritus of that agenda is still with us.
And you're welcome to disagree with me, but without actually backing up any claims, or at least forming a rational argument, it's just not going to be very persuasive. "You're wrong, you don't know what you're talking about, that's not how it happened," isn't saying anything substantive.
When your proposition is clearly nonsensical you can make up all the best arguments in the world, and it still will never be anything but nonsensical. You’re wasting your breath.
Again with an appeal to common sense, the fallacy of unsupported assertion. I'll repeat, you don't agree with me, but you don't know why I'm wrong, and you can't prove it because, in fact, I'm right. You can prove me wrong quite effortlessly by showing one single non-WAP mobile website that existed before January 2007. But it's impossible because they didn't exist before Apple's initiative to build the mobile web (or "Web Apps") due to the delay of the iPhoneSDK, which they did by influencing web developers to use Apple's mobile site design specifications and web tools to try to get mobile Safari users' eyes and clicks on their content.
Even if that is true, which I kind of doubt because before the iPhone there was Opera Mini, it doesn’t prove anything, because obviously if Apple hadn’t made the iPhone, a few years later someone else would have made a phone that could browse the web, and then we would have gotten web apps created for that phone. It’s natural progression, not some diabolical plot by Steve Jobs. I’m pretty sure that the first version of Android that was in the works when Apple released the iPhone came with a web browser just as well. It’s kind of obvious people want that.
If you want to blame someone for web apps, you have to blame either Microsoft who started it all with Outlook Web Access, or Google who lead the way to real interactivity with Google Maps. Perhaps Brandon Eich who created Javascript, Sun who created Java or whoever created the DOM. To blame Apple or Steve Jobs is nonsensical.
And to insist that ‘everybody loathes mobile web apps’ is ridiculous. On this very site there’s plenty of people that prefer Reddits mobile web app to the apps and Twitters web app to the apps. You don’t like them and you don’t like how nobody cares about what you want.
That's not clear, that if Apple didn't do something, someone else would have. It might be true of technology when the elements of advancement are in the air, but this is about design. If Eiffel hadn't designed the Tower in Paris, you can't claim someone else would have. Or more clearly, if Jackson Pollack hadn't painted No. 5, we can't accurately claim it was inevitable someone else would have. There may have been a mobile web, but it isn't necessarily true that it would have been so restrictive. Apple created those tools, such as lock the page to prevent zooming, and it doesn't follow at all that someone else would have thought to prevent mobile browsers from zooming, even if someone else had come up with a zooming mobile browser. Beyond this, your argument is employing what's known as the fallacy of inevitability: nothing in history has ever been inevitable, and when you consider the chaotic nature of change over time, it should be obvious.
It's understandable that a mobile user may want to conserve their data using the mobile versions of websites. What is anathema is Apple giving web developers the ability to force mobile site versions for mobile devices even after the user intentionally chooses to view the desktop site. A lot of sites won't respect that choice without something like &desktop=1 attached to the URL, and often as not even with it. Imgur is one that even if you do get the desktop site to load initially, it will immediately go back to the mobile site once you click to another Imgur page. Slashdot, also, makes it a real pain to not view the mobile version from a device.