Well, the elephant in the room is that an app these days is a packaged version of a website with one twist: notifications. Unless you explicitly disable it via settings, it will try to get a small chunk of your attention every now and then.
- Would you like to enable notifications to see when your EV finishes charging?
- Yes.
(in a couple of days when you're thinking about a completely different topic)
- SPECIAL OFFER! 20% OFF THE FATTY FRIES IF YOU GET A CAR WASH FROM US!!!
And that's everywhere. It pays off due to the scale, just like spam. It costs nothing to send an annoying notification to a horde of users, and even if 1% of the users go for it, it is still 5+ figures of revenue out of a handful of characters pushed to users' devices, and hours of human time wasted dealing with useless annoying distractions.
- Would you like to enable notifications to see when your EV finishes charging?
- Yes.
(in a couple of days when you're thinking about a completely different topic)
- SPECIAL OFFER! 20% OFF THE FATTY FRIES IF YOU GET A CAR WASH FROM US!!!
And that's everywhere. It pays off due to the scale, just like spam. It costs nothing to send an annoying notification to a horde of users, and even if 1% of the users go for it, it is still 5+ figures of revenue out of a handful of characters pushed to users' devices, and hours of human time wasted dealing with useless annoying distractions.