Some arguments below blaming software bloat on nefarious action by big tech and platform owners. Maybe, but there's a simpler explanation: your computer's speed

Some arguments below blaming software bloat on nefarious action by big tech and platform owners. Maybe, but there's a simpler explanation: your computer's speed is a public good, shared by the hosted applications. When you run multiple applications, if one of them is bloated and slow, it takes up processor time and memory. This is then not available to the other applications. So your whole phone/laptop slows down. You don't blame the app. You blame the phone/laptop, and think about buying a new one. As a result, there is little incentive for app developers to create lean, speedy applications. This is a standard public goods problem. Apple may perhaps be deliberately slowing their computers down with software upgrades, but they probably don't need to. They can just wait for app developers to do it for them. This argument also challenges the article's optimism that slow apps create a market opening for faster apps. In particular, while faster startup is something users notice (and blame on the app), memory bloat is not. So developers are likely to (over-)optimise for startup speed, at the cost of being memory-hungry, which in time slows the whole computer down.