It’s really odd to see people on the Chrome team come out so hard against Apple’s WebKit policies when their rationale is that apps are killing the web.
Google makes the OS for 90% of phones shipped. And 100% of the phones that aren’t fast enough to run modern web apps are Android. iPhones generally have enough cache space and speed to run modern web apps, even if the APIs are lacking. It’s low end Android phones that are generally locked out of using most web apps and force people to use native apps.
Android apps are killing the web, not iOS apps. But Apple’s iOS policies directly threaten Google’s business model so Apple gets blamed for the decline.
Another way to look at it: if Apple reversed its iOS policies and let Google ship a full Chrome on iOS, the trend towards native apps and away from web apps would not be affected in any way.
There is no magic API that will make the web stop sucking on low-end devices (or even mid-range devices in many cases).