I’m tired of ‘free’ apps that are just trying to bully me into paying

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…