In a sense, yes. However, I think the farmers in this analogy were more willing/able to be nomadic in the earlier days of osx and ios apps, where now they are much more likely to make the land their permanent home.

This could be because the app store is more stable or reliable as a source of income or from a realization that the Mac App store is the best/only way to present information to a sufficiently wide audience - that wasn't really something developers knew to be true in the earlier years I imagine - maybe the thoughtful ones knew but the rest were still warming up their feet.