If I read the grandparent correctly(and I do agree), the best destination is not Apple, Google or anyone for that matter but rather to stay in the game as an independent.
Where are the small companies that are building for sustainment? All of these product disappearances do have a long-term effect of causing users to hesitate before signing up to use your offering.
That's exactly what I'm talking about. Especially in the case of a product that had revenue/customers, I can't see why you'd want to quit just to go get a job. Sure you'll make some money and your work may have a larger scope to impact, but why not be known as that awesome company that makes awesome things?
If my memory serves me right, a startup that builds apps to improve the experience of a pre-existing service doesn't stay for long as an awesome company that makes awesome things. It usually either plateaus out or gets gobbled up eventually.
I disagree with this romanticism that a company should always be built for sustainment. A small company has only two ways of being successful - either disrupt and be radically different or fill in a piece of the puzzle that a bigger company has not achieved. If you look at the nature of the product the Sparrow team developed - an iOS/Mac client - it wasn't radical. So being gobbled up by an appropriate bigger company is natural course for that startup.
So I should read this as all of the small business owners in the world should either just give up or strive to be acquired by ACME corp? I think we have a very different understanding of the word "successful."
Camera and mail apps don't need to be platform-neutral simply because the content and output of those apps are platform-neutral themselves. Mail apps push and pull apps from servers which can be accessed from other outlets/apps. As for camera apps, as long as they are saving a local copy (like Camera roll), other apps will still be able to access those photos. So yes, convenient form of sharing like direct export-from-app may be lost but the real output would still be platform-neutral.
Where are the small companies that are building for sustainment? All of these product disappearances do have a long-term effect of causing users to hesitate before signing up to use your offering.