“partly because he felt his team did not have the bandwidth to figure out all the complexities that would be involved in policing third-party app developers.”

So the App Store model answered his objections. It's clear from the quotes in that article, he did want apps, but thought web development technologies would be sufficient. When that turned out not to be the case, looks like they turned to the App Store model so they could lock down the experience and keep the same degree of control as for web apps.