I agree, the whole mobile ecosystem feels just gross to me. Microtransactions, everyone pushing their shady app instead of a website, navigating the app stores feels like wading in a swamp where everything wants to kill me.
I predicted that it would end up this way way back in the 2000s when mobile was “the future” and was going to supplant all other forms of computing. I just saw it as obvious due to the walled garden nature of the system. It prohibits so much innovation so all we get is surveillance and addictionware plays.
I really think so, so I'm running /e/ OS with F-Droid as the app store. Thanks to the preinstalled microg, it can even run normal Android apps just fine, and with the built-in privacy settings I can disable trackers inside the few apps I opted to install from the normal Play store.
