> It seems obvious that Apple's interests don't coincide with fully functional cross platform mobile apps.

No, it is not that obvious at all. May I remind you that Apple introduced the iOS SDK, spearheads what is usually recognized as the finest rendering engine out there and built what was the first mobile device actually able to surf the web?

And that they have shown no will or wish to backtrack on any of these, doubling down instead?

There is something much, much simpler to these issues:

1. Jobs's Apple will never again live and die at the whim of a third party. They suffered greatly during the Classic-OSX transition because Apple had lost control of the development platform itself (which was basically owned by Metrowerk and its CodeWarrior)

2. Jobs's Apple takes decisions it thinks benefit its customers and its customers are always its users.

Now they may be wrong on that, and they may be misguided, but time and time again you can (pretty easily) explain the decisions of Jobs's Apple either as trying to avoid losing their platform to a third party or trying to make their user's experience life better.

With web browser they fully control the platform. Hell, they control what can be argued the best web platform available (Google's Chrome is giving them a run for their money, in no small part by building upon their work). They don't fear people using their web browser, they wouldn't have built Canvas if they did (why not leave it out as SVG? Slow, hard to use and not a threat at all), they wouldn't be implementing WebGL, they wouldn't spearheads CSS animations and transitions and all the stuff that can make web applications snazzier and cleaner, they wouldn't have the engine with the best HTML5 support by far.

Web stuff is not a threat, because they can have the best, shiniest and most advanced web stuff and they control all of it (number of full rendering engines allowed on iOS devices? one. Nobody else is allowed to ship a JS interpreter, therefore no full-blown web browser can avoid using the Webkit that ships with it and is fully built by Apple).

Apple doesn't fundamentally mind or care for cross-platform mobile apps, what they fear is a third party's cross platform toolkit taking preeminence over their own tool and deciding of their platform's future. That is why they banned flash (also, because flash is a piece of shit).

> Getting people to build with objective C and native code helps lock in

That only works because you assert Apple wants to lock users in.

> and ensures that any sales go through their payment platform.

Cross-platform tools would have the exact same restriction or face bans. iTunes payment mandate is trivially explained through integration and user-experience (did you know that Apple's subscriptions services makes user information availability to magazines opt-in by the user, whereas just about every other service makes it opt-out if opt-able at all? That's because to Apple the device owner is the customer, to just about every other publisher the magazine is the customer).

> If you don't think Apple has been moving in this way (anti-cross platform dev tools, requiring sales to use the iTunes payments) you simply haven't been paying honest attention.

Either that, or I have not been wearing hate-shaped glasses.

But really, I wonder why I bother with all that typing. I should know by now that HN's view of Apple is the same as /r/tech's: a bashing wankfest.