As a programmer: yes, you're at the mercy of Apple and FB; it's astonishingly easy for them to be arbitrary and capricious and boot your app off.

The key there is "ease". This works both ways.

There are arguably no other places on the net right now where it is as easy for a programmer to get eyeballs for an app as Apple and FB.

You can code an app in the morning and with one part luck and two parts skill you could in theory have a million users by dinnertime*. Try that by posting code to usenet or sourceforge/slashdot.

So, if there's a problem here I don't think it's that things can be shut down quickly, that's just half of it, I think the problem, and I'm not so sure it's really a problem so much as "the way things are now" is that the landscape is more reactive or volatile or whatever you want to call it.

I suspect Ed Gerck would say this kind of chaos is predictable before some sort of coherance evolves out of this morass. But then he's like that.

* Especially a spell checker for these note thingers here.