Paying once is fine. Subs are not to be tolerated.

Honestly, these days I use fdroid as my primary app store. It's been an amazing way to cut through the junk and find great apps.

Very little pisses me off like downloading a 'free' app and immediately being hit with a paywall for a subscription without so much as a free trial. Those devs can go fuck themselves. Their app is NOT free and should not be marked as such.

Alternatively, shit like what Accuweather did also pisses me off. Years ago, they had a one time payment to remove ads permanently. I paid, because I like their service and didn't mind kicking a few bucks their way to support development. A few months later, they introduced a sub model that locked many existing features behind a wall and started showing me ads again. I immediately uninstalled that shit, sent them a scathing email (which I recognize does nothing, but made me feel good), and found an alternative.

https://f-droid.org/

Anyway a lot of these developers get it wrong. Don't bully people into paying with aggressive or misleading tactics as that just alienates your user base. Instead make the app so good to use that people are willing to pay for extra features. The free version should be so good that people stop and wonder how they can support the dev. Then offer a feature that is genuinely useful.

Then use FOSS apps.
Atleast they kindly ask, NOT "BUY THE PAID VERSION OR FUCK YOU, NOTHING FOR YOU, GO TO HELL".

Instead of looking for "free" look for "open source"

If it isn't FOSS, it's not free.

What I can't stand is when platforms don't take no for an answer.

Every fucking visit to Dropbox: "Upgrade to Standard!"

Every check out on Amazon: "Upgrade to Prime!

Every time I open Walmart: "Upgrade to Walmart+"

I fucking can't stand it.

You can either have 0 of my money forever

Or you can have a reasonable amount of it for lifetime access, at minimum, to the version I purchased

I would love to have an overview before I install an app what it might cost. Play store lists at least minimum and maximum in-app-purchases, but the information is not very visible and I cannot filter my results based on it. And if need to pay for a subscription on the app website it will not be reflected at all.

Developers should be forced to provide an outline what you get for free (if they decide to advertise/sell their app as free) and what the different payment/subscription tiers include.

Of all places Microsoft Windows Store does it quite well for some apps (like MS Office), but also does not enforce it for all apps.

Then uuuuh stop using them?

Everything is so enshittified now, that we need to redefine the concept of "free"

Enshitification

The behavior is actively endorsed by the platform.

Unpopular opinion: I'm fine with any try before you buy model as long as (1.) it's clearly stated up front before downloading and also (2.) it allows you to try enough of the app to decide if it does what you want or not

Literally never experienced this. Try fdroid

I'm especially tired of websites dressed up to look like the official place to get (insert free program) and are SEOd to show up first and try to extract money from you.

Then don't use them?

I've only purchased like 3 apps in like 15 years. Every now and then I donate to an open source project. I used to pay for Office, Adobe Cloud, Sony Vegas way back in the day. What happened was the free and open source became far beyond capable than my technical ability and if I needed pay software, it was for work at a company that purchased licenses themselves. It was fast forward in mobile apps. There was already 20 years of open source desktop software being adapted to mobile even if less limited it covered what I and many people would want to do with a mobile device was quickly covered.

Now it's a matter of getting people to stumble on your software first and get them to pay before they learn of any of the truly free stuff. Cloud services where storage/processing is fully off your device and way better in ways are what can't be fully replicated as a free service for people. A NAS can work out to be cheaper for storage but way less functional and more hassle for most people