Well, it's innovation along a different dimension. There's been a massive amount of progress in terms of bringing computing to the consumer since 1995 - just compare the user interface of an ATM to that of a mobile app. There's been a concurrent slide backward in attributes like performance, reliability, and especially security. The market seems to reward ubiquity more than any other dimension right now, and you get products to match.
Much of the complexity in often-derided web & mobile app development comes from supporting features - like the back button, direct linking, social interactions, real-time response, and no-install usage - that directly benefit ubiquity, but come with penalties on performance/reliability/security/etc.
Bringing computing to the consumer in a way that lets you control their experience and extract rents, perhaps. We haven't been doing so well when it comes to the original liberatory purpose of personal computing.
"Bringing computing to the consumer in a way that lets you control their experience and extract rents, perhaps."
Desktops are more open and capable than ever. A number of those capabilities started in rent-seeker platforms, too. So, parent's point about increase in capabilities for consumers stands both for proprietary and FOSS.
Much of the complexity in often-derided web & mobile app development comes from supporting features - like the back button, direct linking, social interactions, real-time response, and no-install usage - that directly benefit ubiquity, but come with penalties on performance/reliability/security/etc.