The article is dated 2010. The App Store was opened in 2008. The iPhone was released in 2007.
Flash was not present from the start, and the intention at release in 2007 was that web applications would be how 3rd party developers developed for the iPhone. The decision not to have Flash on the iPhone in 2007 cannot possibly have been to drive downloads from an App Store that did not exist.
So walk me through the narrative you're trying to sell here. Apple launches the iPhone without App Store or Flash in 2007. A year later, they launch an App Store. TWO years later, Steve Jobs writes a piece about why they don't include Flash.
If this was a coordinated attack on Flash in support of the App ecosystem, why wait so long to write that letter? Why launch your phone without an app store in the first place?
I'm not claiming they wanted to kill Flash, I'm claiming that dropping Flash because "we have open standard HTML5" was complete bullshit. And years later this is still pretty obvious. iPhone doesn't fully support HTML5 features, which results in crippled PWA installation on iPhone.
So no, they did not drop Flash because they like to support HTML5.
So if there is no Flash, an no full support of HTML5, it's pretty obvious the only way to get apps on iPhone is through the app store.
I remember reading that and concluding it was the app store, so I'm pretty sure it already existed.
A quick search on wikipedia: "The App Store was opened on July 10, 2008, with an initial 500 applications available."
The article is dated 2010! If you can count that is 2 years!
Completely false...tsssss...