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The idea behind a decentralized application is that once it’s deployed, it’s virtually impossible to take down. These don’t exist yet. Every so called DApp has at least some part of it controlled by a person or company.
Blockchain enabled the concept of a decentralized application and Ethereum in particular made it popular, but the reality is “DApps” just store some small bits of data on a blockchain, usually related to ownership of assets, and the rest is run by the company that created it.
In the case of decentralized exchanges, there is a spectrum from more decentralized to more centralized, but they ALL have major pieces centralized. Even Etherdelta which is probably the furthest one on the decentralized end of the spectrum has their order book on a centralized server. The rest are more centralized than Etherdelta with multiple centralized pieces. Just because the name has DEX in it, doesn’t mean it’s decentralized (this is true 100% of the time).
In the case of crypto collectibles like CryptoKitties, the “decentralized” part is tokens (a random number) stored on blockchain. When you buy a kitty, you are actually buying a random number, an ID, for the kitty you bought. Everything else is run by the company that built it, Axiom Zen. This includes the marketplace, the auctions, the data, even the…