From what I gather the reality is less sinister than you imply.
But if you know the motives of Tapatalk and I’m mistaken, it would be illuminating to back up your statements with the facts you use to reach your conclusions rather than just stating conclusions.
This is a company that I used to like. Once upon a time, when browsers on phones sucked, it served a useful purpose. I even paid for the pro version. But then they started screwing around with the UI to put everything into a curated feed (that they could insert ads into). It got buggier, crashing a lot. If you try to get support you get no response. If you give a 1 star review they respond very quickly, suggesting that you just need to contact them. "Please write to us to
support@tapatalk.com with more detail and we'll look into it. Thank you." That's been their canned response literally for years. (Seriously, look at the critical reviews.) They won't actually fix anything, but they think it makes them appear to care. The pro version went away. Then the pro version came back, but I have to buy it again for even more money. Now you can give them money every month to take away the ads they added. AND NOW CRYPTOCURRENCY BECAUSE WHY NOT? It takes a lot of work now to get around the list of things they've decided I should be interested in. How much of that is based on my actual interests, how much are they taking kickbacks? Certainly it has a pretty warped view of what I care about. But wait, why the hell are they trying to monitor what I'm reading in the first place? I just got this thing to make it easier to read a forum back when it had a lousy mobile browser interface, not to have some sketchy company monetize me. And the forum I got it for in the first place has long since upgraded and works fine on a phone now. So I guess if someone doesn't think they're getting enough ads based on companies with bad track records scooping up personal info, tapatalk is a good fix for that. Otherwise, run away. AFAICT whoever wrote this thing back when I was using it a lot (6+ years ago?) is long gone, having passed it on to some other bottom feeders. On the up side, this conversation reminded me that I still had it installed, and when I click links in google searches I have to tell my phone to just use the browser and not open the link with tapatalk (which doesn't actually open to the message I'm interested in; functionality is obviously less important than showing me another ad). So I finally remembered to uninstall it--thanks!--and I'll just deal with the annoying prompt that tapatalk-enabled forums constantly pop up to try to get me to install tapatalk.