The developer who made a useful website with a link to their paypal has been mostly obsoleted by app developers. Small tool development isn't a novel creation of modern mobile devices - it's just the packaging of these into bespoke binaries that have highly regulated distribution channels. A cynical person might assume that part of the reason Apple hated flash so much is that it threatened to stunt the upcoming app market. To lend some credence to this position, things like Kofi have taken off in recent (on my scale) years as HTML5 gained enough traction to essentially duplicate the functionality of flash without any of the security issues - I personally think this is what led to the feature to save websites as apps on iOS and that is something that doesn't threaten Apple much with their network advantage, but has the potential to cut into their revenue if it gets popular enough.

The problem is when that innovative company becomes the new IBM/GE/Oracle and starts treating every client as nothing else but a revenue stream instead of focusing on creating new and innovative products. I don’t think Apple/Google are there yet but they are clearly moving into that direction.