Status is all about allowing end users to access decentralized ethereum world (Web3). Ethereum ecosystem is in its infancy and most of the tools it provides are still evolving.
One of the existing way to build decentralized application is the DApps stack.
It is essentially the old web2 stack (HTML/JS) with some JS API (web3.js) access to ethereum.
This stack is the one commonly used today and status supports it.
As DApps are an de-facto established standard they run on other browsers: mist, toshi, cipher, ..
Status offers another tool for 3rd party developers: an API. Using it developers can develop bot commands that can have native UI. Those commands live within status and have privileges to interact with its internals.