This can't possibly happen because regardless of how big Apple is, it is tiny compared to the Internet and everyone who depends on the open Internet, from Amazon, Facebook, Google, Netflix to whitehouse.gov and data.nasa.gov
That's not what I'm saying. Amazon, Facebook, Google and Netflix would be victims of this. People would still use their services, but they'd use their services through the dedicated iOS app, not through a browser. Then Apple will have become a necessary middle man for the consumption of the content that those companies distribute. And who knows what Apple would be able to get away with at that point. Charge Facebook $100mm whenever the push out an updated version of their app? All Amazon purchases must be made with ApplePay? Who knows.
This would be anti competitive as soon as the app store had a majority market share.
If it became too difficult for them "Charge Facebook $100mm" they would replace support with a lower quantity web app and blame Apple.
The reality is that Apple don't have as much interest in the web anymore, they have achieved their goal with web standards (removing enough of a dependency on Flash so they didn't have to support it). They have no need to make the web a successful app platform, so why waste effort on it.
For Google it's part of their core business, look at Angular, Closure tools, Dart, GWT etc...
Most of it comes from AdWords, i.e. Google Search. Angular, GWT, Closure, and Dart have nothing to do with it. They're also all essentially abandonware from Google's point of view, because management has rightly realized they have nothing to do with their core business.
This depends entirely on how you measure scale. If you do it just by number of apps/sites, sure, the vast majority of web URLs don't have a matching iOS app.
However, if you scale each app by the total amount of time users are on it, you'll find that most of humanity is spending their time on a very heavily weighted small slice of the Internet.
From that breakdown, the fraction of human-hours that is covered by sites that also have native iOS apps is much larger.
If the next version of iOS didn't even have a browser, you would be astonished at how little that impacted most users. As long as they can still run Facebook, Instagram, Threes, etc., they'd be fine.
> If the next version of iOS didn't even have a browser, you would be astonished at how little that impacted most users.
If time spent in an application is your criterion, true.
But that way you hugely underestimate the importance of, for instance, that daily (or even weekly) Google search the average user performs in their browser. It takes little time compared to your average social feed, but definitely impacts their lives. Just one quick example: a local business' phone number lookup.
I'd like to agree with you on a philosophical basis, but the reality is that Apple is 2x market cap of Exxon and iPhones recently outsold all Android in the US (calendar Q4 2014).
I don't think it's useful to downplay their influence.
