> Then, how could native apps have much better performance on the same hardware, on both Android and iOS?

Web engines were honestly not great back then. WebKit was ok but JavaScriptCore was very slow, and of course that’s what iOS, Android, and BB10 were all running on that slow hardware. I have distinct (bad) memories that even “GPU-accelerated” CSS animations were barely 15fps, while native apps reliably got 60fps unless they really messed up. That’s on top of the infamous 300ms issue, where every tap took 300ms to fire off because it was waiting to see if you were trying to double-tap.

So I really think some of the blame is still shared with Apple, although it’s hard to say if that’s because of any malicious intent to prop up the App Store, or just because they were under pressure to build out the iOS platform that there wasn’t enough time to optimise. I suspect it was both.