too slow for native apps.

Read that again to yourself, slowly.

A concept of thin clients is of course completely unthinkable in this context.

Thin clients with 2007-era javascript interpreters as the only code execution framework (vs local MACH-O binaries) does seem to be a bit of a weird choice if "slow" was the problem and you intended to have thin clients.

There's also a backend. Back in 2007 a web app was mostly backend code that would send you HTML to display, and at worst it would have some AJAX for a chatbox/autoreload.

Not really. I mean, iPhones were slower than laptops back then but that’s not saying much as all phones were in the same ballpark at best. The actual reasons are well documented: it was a ressource hog (on all platforms, not only phones; there were still netbooks around), sucked batteries dry (including on both Windows and Mac laptops with much better batteries than phones), and was unstable (being the leading cause of crashes on Macs at the time). Jobs even wrote an open letter about it.

It was not practical on Android either, mostly a stunt, and faded quietly into obscurity over the course of a couple of years.

Eh. Jobs was disingenuous at the best of times, I had Flash Lite running fine on Symbian a year or so before the iPhone hit the market.

I'm not saying it was great, but performance/efficiency was massively better than similar code in JS at the time. (And several years later, I rewrote a Flash app for ancient Tivo boxes in HTML/JS - same functionality, half the performance even after a lot of fine tuning.)

He was on firmer ground complaining about the bugs & security issues admittedly!