> if people were willing to pay for apps This works to the advantage of a handful of large tech companies. Google, Facebook/Meta, Twitter/X, Apple, Microsoft,

> if people were willing to pay for apps This works to the advantage of a handful of large tech companies. Google, Facebook/Meta, Twitter/X, Apple, Microsoft, and some Chinese companies like Tencent, have the scale and market position to give away at least some of their respective applications. They provide what the article describes as a "joyless revenue machine that exploits your users’ attention and privacy at every turn", and do so with sufficient volume and market dominance to be profitable. In a world where almost anyone can whip up an app, the inability to charge for it, and difficulty of growing large enough to profit off user attention and data, acts as a barrier to entry.