> My strong belief is they want apps because they can spam you with notifications to get your attention.

My strong belief is they realized people were prone to spending absurd amounts of money in Facebook games, so they hijacked "social gaming" and spent 20 years deteriorating in defense of it.

Consider this timeline:

- Apple launches iPhone in 2007 with web apps central

- Zynga launches "Zynga Poker" on FB in 2007

- Apple launches App Store in 2008 with single-purchase apps

- Zynga hits 40 million monthly users in 2009

- Apple implements IAP and defensive policies in 2009

- Hundreds of millions of people playing Facebook games in 2010

... Apple goes to war with, bans and eventually kills Flash, the core technology to these games, and all of it moves to mobile and IAP

... web apps deprioritized, arms race with other browsers prevented