It's funny remembering how people would say stuff like "if you aren't paying for the product, you ARE the product", and someone even tried to make a Twitter clone where the only differentiator was that you'd pay for it to "prevent" ads and tracking.

I thought back then that even if it succeeded in gaining enough users to beat Twitter, it would fail because eventually investors' demand for growth would force them to add ads anyway. You see this happening with cable TV, Roku, and now even Apple.

The only way to prevent this is to have a company motivated by something other than growing profits, but that comes with its own problems: stagnation, bloated bureaucracy, and capture by special interests without profit to keep the organization honest and lean.

I don't know what the right solution is, only that in very competitive for-profit markets, companies don't dare to worsen the user experience with ads lest they lose customers to a competitor. Given the barriers to entry for developing a new smartphone, including the strong network effect of the app store and OS APIs, this is not that type of market. Most androids already have ads and bloatware, so Apple isn't facing any competitive pressure on this front, sadly.