What is particularly unpleasant is the flavor of bad that seems to be favored. Cheap junk has its uses; it’s often the vanguard of availability to mere mortals or the only flavor for items that are just plain stubbornly expensive to do right(I know my access to computers has more to do with cheap and lousy toy systems that eventually grew up than it does with mainframes and classy workstations that grew down; and things like 3d printers that don’t cost more than cars are the Harbor Freight of the genre, possibly worse; but still far more useful than fine articles one cannot afford access to); but hostile junk, whether as collateral damage of some reoccurring-revenue model or by design, puts a spanner in the works when it comes to the process of junk leading to accessibility that is usually accompanied by improvement.
The hostility both makes it more likely for junk to invade niches that didn’t really need any ‘disruption’(as in this case, where a UI that would shame a burner handset has been added to a water cooler mostly because subscriptions are desired, not because it’s a remotely good idea); and throws up barriers to improvements based on the scale of the cheap and awful (as with the various dire Android widgets that offer astonishing capable hardware; but will never be redeemed because their horrific software is a binary blobfest, cryptographically enforced, or both. Lots of hardware in that category: astonishing cheap and capable; but the firmware is either actively adversarial, too insecure to live, or both; but also designed to resist attempts to fix it.)
This isn’t to say that “back in my day, lemon markets were a force for good, damn kids…”; they have always had their risks and drawbacks, some serious; but back when the lemon vendors had to surrender control in order to sell there were some genuinely valuable opportunities that certainly weren’t being encouraged by the upmarket vendors, in addition to the pure crap. I suspect that there will continue to be some; but the rise of ‘as a service’ this and tivoized that and litigation based on ever more tenuous theories of indirect infringement are not at all helping matters.
