OC isn’t claiming that the shift in the industry is solely Apple’s fault:
I don’t hate Apple but I do hate their influence
The reality is that what OC said is exactly what happened. Apple removed the headphone jack to coerce people into buying AirPods. Everyone else released their own wireless earbuds to compete, and also removes their headphone jacks for the same reason.
Last I heard they want to switch to another platform, and don’t consider it worth upgrading to 0.19 because they’re leaving soon so it wouldn’t be worth the hassle.
This is pure guesswork on my part, but they could be waiting for Sublinks (a Lemmy-compatible backend) to get up to speed before switching to that. They say that the new platform is “compatible with all Lemmy apps”, and Sublinks is the only project I know of that fits that criteria.