I think part of the reason the most popular Facebook apps appear to be games (I'd need to look at stats but aren't news media type apps more prevalent?) is beca

I think part of the reason the most popular Facebook apps appear to be games (I'd need to look at stats but aren't news media type apps more prevalent?) is because Facebook has decimated the value proposition for more sophisticated applications. We ended up abandoning a startup product built on Facebook which was far more sophisticated and interesting than games in our opinion, but it just became clear that Facebook was actively taking off the table any possible commercial benefit of building on their platform. No significant virality to be gained - even if users WANT to share your product it's virtually impossible to do so nowadays as you don't know for sure it'll ever appear in anyone's feed; their Credits payment platform is daylight robbery at 30% for little better than payment processing. I completely agree with you. It's just not viable. If you get little to no customer acquisition benefit from building on their platform and they take too much revenue off the table, and if they keep changing things making it hard to remain stable, and it's hard to know if they'll arbitrarily shut you down if they decide you have a lucrative business proposition, why build on it. I wonder if they suffer an internal lack of imagination as to what people might use their platform for, and therefore don't understand that they've rendered it worthless for many use cases where they could have been a real platform AND generated additional revenues. The final issue I see is that if you build something innovative on their platform they have every data point they need to see if it's taking off and being successful - probably before you realize it. This means they can shut you down and buil da competitor, or make you a lowball aqui-hire offer with that threat. Their haste to move quickly has, I think, caused them to make some strategic mistakes in platform strategy which have hurt their long term position as a platform. Of course, they may not care. They may have quietly, internally, abandoned such an aim, and decided they no longer genuinely want to be a platform on which others build sophisticated applications.