What if there's no paid alternative, because everyone realized that adware and dark patterns are more profitable?
Such is the case every time I see someone say "vote with our wallets". Customers don't get to vote with their wallets, because they can only choose from what's available, not from the space of all imaginable software.
Unfortunately, too few people care about the various problems with advertisements - not the least of which are privacy concerns - to do that. They'd rather have the software, and [think they] ignore the ads.
This would be reasonable, but I can't help thinking that many - if not most - are not making informed decisions.
The beautiful thing about software is, if they don't like it, they can recreate it themselves. But yes, the incentive to show ads is quite high by the advertisers.
We tried the easy way (pay for the app) and it didn't work, now we do it the hard way (ads).
Such is the case every time I see someone say "vote with our wallets". Customers don't get to vote with their wallets, because they can only choose from what's available, not from the space of all imaginable software.