This seems to be way overstating whatever role Apple played in this. Tumblr debuted before the iPhone and continues even today to work perfectly fine in a brows

This seems to be way overstating whatever role Apple played in this. Tumblr debuted before the iPhone and continues even today to work perfectly fine in a browser. It's just a stream of text and images, effectively exactly what a browser was designed for. I'm sure they'd love the greater access to privacy invading hardware features they can get from a native app, but it hardly seems critical to their continue existence as a product. Also, the estimated drop in user traffic after the adult content ban was 30%. When Tumblr was purchased by Yahoo, they paid $1.1 billion. When Verizon sold it to Wordpress, it was for $3 million. They is way more than a 30% value drop. It seems pretty damn likely to me that Tumblr has just always been somewhat of a niche community compared to the larger social platforms out there and Yahoo overpaid dramatically because Yahoo was one of the stupidest big tech parent companies to ever acquire other companies, and the failure to ever realize that hoped for value had little to do with whether iPhone users could consume through a native app or had to use the browser.