Apple has to maintain a balance. High iPhone sales times high margins per phone are the future of Apple for years to come. Their other businesses, large as they are, are mere sideshows for now at Apple, because of the outsized success of iPhone. The only competition to iPhone now is Android, and Android margins are generally dismal. Apple has to somehow hold out against that competition without resorting to lowering their own margins, and the only thing that makes that possible is a reputation for being "so much better".

The Web's importance as a platform is high, so the reputation of iPhone as a Web client is part of the reputation that supports iPhone's excess margins (over Android). They must maintain that reputation in the general consumer market. Consumers have a sense of what the Web currently can do (things based on older features), and iOS Safari needs to be rock solid at supporting that, but it doesn't have to support things the Web could potentially do as long as the market isn't even aware of that potential.

And how would they be? We developers won't build anything that won't work in an iPhone. Apple knows that, and they put their what could be done mojo into their native APIs, showing off how much better it is than the limited features of the Web. And Safari can limit what people think is possible on the Web as a whole by limiting browser capabilities on iOS, confident that developers wouldn't dare use any Web feature that wouldn't work on iOS.

But if developers started building things at the margin that had more powers on an Android phone than on iOS without committing business suicide, the perception in the market could begin to be affected: "Android browsers support all of our features, and iOS users can either use the features supported by Safari or download our native app from the App Store to get full support for all the features [...that Android users get automatically from a better browser...].

After seeing a couple of those messages, the mainstream media might start picking up the sense that iOS Safari is not delivering on the full potential of the Web and spread the word, which Apple would have to counteract.

Of course, for this "counteraction" to come in the form of additional feature support in Safari, Chrome browsers on Android really would have to be better, and there is some reason to believe that they aren't yet. In other words, maybe they "support" more features than Safari but the features they "support" don't work very well. In that case, it would make sense for Apple to fight back using their own Web apps demonstrating (on stage) the "superiority of iPhone for the Web" instead of improving Safari.

But if Chrome could get its act together and developers would push the edges of features that were supported everywhere on the Web but iPhone (and required native in iPhone), it could cause enough of a change in perception in the market to get Apple to incorporate more Web features into Safari, enabling the whole Web platform to move forward.

Just as market changes forced MS to initially create a great browser to compete with Netscape for "best Web support", then let them use later versions of IE to put their foot on the brake, and then were forced to let go of the brake and compete again, the same market forces seem to be driving Safari and can be used to get Apple to get off the brake and back onto the accelerator.