That will be irrelevant in 7 years (time horizon in the article) since Apples's device share will continue to dwindle relative to Android. It will be the same as the historical OSX/Windows ratio. They already signaled that by focusing on pushing up the price per phone versus the number of phones as their stock price driver.

Arguing “market share” as a headcount instead of, say, disposable income share or % of mobile spend, is like arguing the 1% is irrelevant because they’re only 1 in 100.

Isn’t there a security argument for limiting native APIs to apps from the App Store?

True but for web apps you use the same way to give permissions to use your device sensors you would use for a native app. The only difference is that it doesn't pass through the app store review process and apple gets no cut for it.

> for web apps you use the same way to give permissions to use your device sensors you would use for a native app

Which would mean any malicious site a user got tricked into visiting can access the native API. (Downloading an app is more deliberate than visiting a site and instinctively clicking to make the pop-up go away.)

All I'm saying is there are non-financial reasons why an OS designer might sandbox websites from the native API.