At the June 5, 2007 Worldwide Developers Conference keynote, Steve Jobs announced that Apple's Safari browser would come to Windows and revealed that the upcoming iPhone, then a month from release, would support third-party web applications built with web standards rather than native apps—a decision Apple would reverse a year later with the App Store.
Jobs framed the decision as a deliberate strategy: rather than opening the iPhone to native third-party software immediately, Apple would let developers build 'web apps' using Ajax and standard web technologies that ran inside Safari's mobile browser. It was a cautious, security-conscious approach for a device Apple had bet the company's future on.
The strategy proved short-lived. Developer frustration with the limitations of web apps—no access to hardware features, spotty performance—led Apple to reverse course within a year, launching the native App Store in July 2008. That store would eventually generate hundreds of billions of dollars and reshape how software is distributed globally.
The Safari for Windows move was itself a hedge, an attempt to grow Safari's market share to make the web-app strategy for iPhone more viable. It never gained significant traction against Internet Explorer and Firefox and was eventually discontinued in 2012, a footnote to the same keynote that quietly set in motion the mobile-app economy.