The Day We All Became Hostages to Our Own Apps
Remember when you could just buy something and own it?
There’s this moment I remember from 2012. I was on a train to Boston, killing time with Angry Birds on my phone. I’d paid 99 cents for it. The whole game, just mine. No interruptions, no timers telling me I’d run out of lives, no pop-ups begging me to buy power-ups I didn’t need. Just a simple, complete game that respected the fact that I’d already paid for it.
I think about that a lot now, mostly because that world doesn’t exist anymore. And also because I didn’t know it at the time, but that little game was probably stealing everything it could from my phone.
Somewhere between then and now, something fundamental shifted in how apps work. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say something shifted in how apps think about us. We went from being users to being resources. The apps we loved, the ones that promised to make our lives easier or more fun or more connected, they all quietly became extraction machines. Not just for our money, but for our data, our attention, our time. Everything they could take.
And here’s the thing that makes it so grotesque: they think they’re entitled to it.
Before iOS and Android implemented granular permissions, these apps were just vacuum cleaners for personal data. Your contacts, your location history, your usage patterns, what other apps you had installed, when you used them, how long you used them. Everything they could touch, they took. They built entire business models on information they harvested without meaningful consent, sold it to data brokers, used it to build advertising profiles so detailed they knew things about you that you barely knew about yourself.
Then Apple and Google finally added permission controls, and these marketing parasites acted like their human rights were being violated. They treated privacy settings like theft. As if our personal information belonged to them by default, and we were being unreasonable for wanting to keep it.
That entitlement never went away. It just found new expressions.
Take Duolingo. Remember when it launched with that beautiful mission statement about free education for everyone? It felt revolutionary. You could learn French or Spanish or Japanese, completely free, with just a few ads sprinkled in. Manageable. Reasonable. The kind of trade-off that felt fair.
Then one day you finish a lesson and there’s an ad. Fine. You finish another lesson. Another ad. Every single lesson now. Someone actually did the math on the complete French course: 1,260 lessons means 1,260 ads, each between five and thirty seconds long. Ten hours. Ten hours of watching commercials to complete a forty-six hour course. They’re making you spend nearly a quarter of your learning time watching advertisements for their own premium service.
But the ads were just the beginning. Eventually Duolingo started locking away the actual educational parts. The feature that explained your mistakes, that showed you the grammar rules you’d violated? Premium only now. Pay us thirteen dollars a month or just keep getting things wrong without understanding why. It’s like buying a textbook where all the answer explanations have been blacked out unless you subscribe.
People started posting on Reddit about memorizing the Super Duolingo ad copy word for word. They’d seen it so many times it was burned into their brains. Some of them finally broke down and subscribed just to make it stop. Which was, of course, exactly the point.
The app promised free education for the world. What it delivered was psychological warfare designed to break you into paying. And the marketing goons behind it feel absolutely no shame about this. They genuinely believe your attention belongs to them, that making you watch ten hours of ads to learn a language is perfectly reasonable, that holding educational features hostage is just good business.
Spotify pulled a similar trick, just more gradually. When it launched in the United States back in 2011, you’d hear ads every four to seven songs. Annoying, sure, but tolerable. The deal felt clear. You could pay for premium or you could deal with some interruptions. Your choice.
Except now it’s ads every two songs. And not just one ad. Three to six consecutive thirty-second spots, playing back to back. You finish listening to a song you love and suddenly you’re sitting through ninety seconds of commercials before the next track starts. One person reported hearing the same ad fifty times in a single eight-hour workday. Fifty times.
They also play the ads louder than the music. You’re listening to something chill, volume set comfortably low, and then an ad literally screams at you. It’s not an accident. It’s designed to jolt you into attention, to make sure you can’t just tune it out. It’s acoustic assault as business strategy.
And here’s the part that reveals the absolute contempt: they have a “dislike” button for ads. You can mark them as irrelevant. People report clicking that button dozens of times on the same ad and still seeing it over and over. The button doesn’t do anything. It’s theater. It exists to give you the illusion of control while they continue bombarding you with whatever they want.
Because here’s the thing. Spotify doesn’t actually want you to enjoy the free tier. They generate ninety percent of their revenue from premium subscriptions. The ads aren’t really there to make money from advertisers. They’re there to break you. Eighty percent of premium subscribers started as free users who just couldn’t take it anymore. The misery is the product. The relief you feel when you finally pay eleven dollars a month, that’s what they’re selling.
The ads aren’t even the worst part though. While Spotify is torturing you with repetitive commercials, they’re also harvesting data about everything you listen to, when you listen to it, how long you listen, what you skip, what you replay. They’re building a profile of your musical taste, your daily routines, your emotional patterns. And they sell access to that data. Your listening habits become marketing intelligence for other companies trying to sell you things.
You’re not Spotify’s customer. You’re their product. The advertisers are the customers. And Spotify feels completely entitled to package and sell your attention and your data to those advertisers, whether you like it or not.
Mobile gaming might be the purest distillation of this whole ugly evolution. Angry Birds used to cost a dollar. You paid once and got 390 levels. That was it. That simple transaction made the game one of the most successful mobile titles in history, generating hundreds of millions in revenue from people who were happy to pay a dollar for a good game.
Then someone ran the numbers and realized that free games with ads and microtransactions make three hundred times more money than paid games. Three hundred times. So they retrofitted the original Angry Birds, the one people had already paid for, and added ads and microtransactions to it. Then they made Angry Birds 2, which was essentially a blueprint for how to make a game as miserable as possible without people deleting it entirely.
Lives that regenerate every thirty minutes unless you watch ads. Video ads after every failed attempt. Banner ads during gameplay that block where your birds fly. Pop-ups every time you open a menu. And here’s the truly insane part: in 2019, they deleted every original paid Angry Birds game from the app stores. Just removed them. Games that people had bought simply vanished. When fans revolted, they briefly offered a paid remake, then deleted that too in 2023. The paid version made thirty thousand dollars a month. The ad-filled version made nine million. So they eliminated the choice entirely.
The pattern is everywhere now. Words with Friends shows you a full-screen ad after every single turn. Homescapes and Gardenscapes got banned in the UK for false advertising because the puzzle gameplay in their ads represented less than one percent of the actual game. You download something expecting one experience and get something completely different, something that requires hours of grinding to reach anything resembling what they promised.
And while these games are interrupting you every thirty seconds with ads, they’re also tracking everything. How long you play, what levels you fail, what items you almost buy, when you’re most likely to make a purchase. They’re running psychological experiments on you in real time, optimizing for maximum extraction. Your gameplay data gets analyzed and sold. Your attention gets monetized. Your frustration gets weaponized into revenue.
The marketing people behind all of this genuinely believe they’re the victims in this scenario. When people started installing ad blockers, these parasites acted like ad-blocking was theft. As if we owe them our eyeballs. As if the right to interrupt us, to track us, to harvest our data and sell it, is somehow sacred and inviolable.
Nine hundred and twelve million people worldwide have installed ad-blocking software. That’s not a fringe movement. That’s nearly a billion people who got so fed up they took active steps to sabotage the business model. In the United States alone, thirty-two percent of people block ads. Baby boomers do it at the same rate as millennials. This is the largest coordinated consumer resistance movement in internet history.
Publishers lost somewhere between forty-seven and fifty-four billion dollars in ad revenue in 2023. That’s eight percent of all digital ad spending, just gone. Trust in advertising has collapsed to thirty-seven percent, dead last among all industries. Below banking. Below energy companies.
When YouTube tried to crack down on ad blockers by threatening to limit people to three videos, searches for ad-blocking software spiked by 336 percent. Users found workarounds within hours. One site described it perfectly: YouTube might be powered by money, but ad-blocking developers are powered by spite.
And YouTube’s response? Indignation. How dare users try to watch videos without watching ads. How dare they try to block trackers. Don’t they understand that YouTube is entitled to monetize their attention? The sheer audacity of these people, acting like they have a right to control their own devices, to choose what content gets loaded into their browsers, to protect their own privacy.
The marketing industry has convinced itself that our attention is a natural resource they have the right to extract. Like coal or oil. Something that exists for them to harvest and profit from. They’ve built entire economic models on this assumption, and now they’re furious that people are pushing back.
But here’s the trap. Most of us can’t actually leave. Spotify has all your playlists, years of carefully curated music. Duolingo has your streak, your progress, all that time invested. Mobile games have your saved progress, your achievements, sometimes even your social connections. These platforms built monopolies through habit and investment, then exploited that lock-in to make the experience progressively worse.
They’re betting that most people will either tolerate the misery or eventually pay to escape it. And so far, they’ve been mostly right. The apps didn’t die. They just became things we hate but can’t quit.
The really sick part is that paying doesn’t even solve the problem completely. You pay for Spotify Premium and they still harvest your data. You pay for Duolingo Super and they’re still building a profile of your learning habits. You pay to remove ads from a mobile game and there are still microtransactions everywhere, still dark patterns trying to manipulate you into spending more.
Because the entitlement goes deeper than the ads. These companies believe they own your data, your attention, your time. They believe they have the right to know everything about you, to track you across apps and websites, to build shadow profiles and sell access to your life. And when you try to opt out, when you use privacy settings or ad blockers or just delete their apps, they act like you’re the one being unreasonable.
I still think about that train ride sometimes. About how simple it used to be. You paid a dollar, you got a game. You downloaded an app, it did what it promised. The transaction was clean and complete.
Now everything feels like a hostage negotiation with yourself. And on the other side of that negotiation is an entire industry of marketing goons who genuinely believe they’re entitled to everything they can take from you, who see your resistance as theft, who treat your attention and your data as resources that belong to them by right.
They’re not going to stop. The only thing that’s going to change this is if enough people get angry enough to actually leave, to delete the apps, to accept the inconvenience of losing those playlists and streaks and saved progress. To treat these companies with the same contempt they’ve been treating us with all along.
Until then, we’re all just hostages trying to negotiate better terms with captors who think they own us.