The slow death of good apps

By Noel Galon de Leon

There was a time when apps felt like gifts. Remember when Grab used to give you PHP 20 rides anywhere in the city? Or when Shopee’s “Free Shipping” really meant free? Those days are gone. What we have now are apps that pretend to serve us but are really just squeezing the last drop of patience from our screens. That process has a name, one that sounds crude but perfectly fits the mess we’re in. It’s called enshittification, a term coined to describe the slow decay of once-good platforms that rot from the inside out when profit becomes more important than people.

You see it everywhere, even in a city as quietly ambitious as Iloilo. The digital world here has caught up with the rest of the country. We order food through our phones, hail rides, pay bills online, and stalk potential dates on apps like everyone else. But lately, every tap feels like a small betrayal. What was supposed to make life easier now feels like a maze of ads, pop-ups and hidden charges. The “free” convenience now comes with a heavy invisible tax on your patience, privacy and sanity.

Take the food delivery apps. When they first arrived in Iloilo, riders were smiling, fees were small, and promos popped up every week. It felt like the city had finally joined the big leagues. Now? You order a PHP 120 meal and pay PHP 100 more for delivery, packaging and a “small order fee.” Riders earn less even though customers pay more. The company takes the biggest slice and tells everyone it’s just “the cost of innovation.” It’s not innovation. It’s corporate greed with a glossy interface.

The same story plays out with ride-hailing apps. Try booking a Grab at 6 p.m. near SM City Iloilo and you’ll see surge prices that could buy you a decent dinner. And don’t get me started on those “priority booking” offers that basically make you pay extra just to be treated like a normal human being. It’s psychological warfare disguised as a convenience feature. They break the app just enough to make you pay to fix it.

Even local platforms and services are catching the disease. Some city e-services that promised to make business permit processing “paperless” are now so riddled with system errors that people line up again at city hall anyway. We are told it’s modernization, but it feels more like the same old bureaucracy hiding behind a digital curtain. Iloilo, for all its progress, risks turning into a tech-friendly facade where everything looks efficient until you actually try to use it.

The truth is that enshittification doesn’t happen overnight. It begins when companies prioritize investors over users, then quietly make the product just a bit worse each year. They add fees here, hide features there, insert ads where joy used to live. Users complain, but stay. That’s the tragedy. The apps have become so essential that we endure their nonsense because quitting feels impossible.

What makes this all the more disturbing is that we’ve accepted it. We shrug, we sigh, we pay. We even joke about it. “That’s how it is now,” people say. But it doesn’t have to be. Enshittification thrives on resignation. It feeds on our lowered expectations and our tired willingness to click “Agree” on every updated Terms of Service.

Maybe the solution isn’t to delete every app. Maybe it’s to start remembering that convenience shouldn’t always mean surrender. Iloilo is a city that prides itself on progress, and progress should not mean trading freedom for faster checkouts. We deserve technology that works for people, not against them. Until we demand better, we’ll keep scrolling through this endless feed of digital disappointment, wondering how something that once felt revolutionary turned into just another way to get ripped off in real time.