I feel like 2025 has been the year of quitting apps for me. Some of this has been due to moving to more privacy-focused open-source or self-hosted apps, but a pervasive theme has been free apps simply getting worse as a way to try to push users to a paid tier.
Many of us are used to the trend of free platforms becoming worse in the pursuit of monetization — it’s what has made me skeptical of any new free product Google or Meta launches. But when it comes to smartphone apps specifically, I’ve noticed that apps are increasingly marketing themselves as free while being almost unusable without a paid subscription.