I've been on Tumblr for longer than I care to admit, and a good deal of that time was spent fighting with the mobile app. Six years completely wasted shouting into the void about how many advertisments the app would show after forcing an update on me, about glitches that affected how certain posts would display on mobile, "Sorry, this post originated from the web and cannot be edited at this time," shit like that. The thing that finally got me off the app and onto the mobile version of the website was Tumblr's ad partners started autoclicking on far-right adverts at the height of Donald Trump's 2020 re-election campaign. Honestly, I wouldn't have cared if the adverts were from people so far to the left that they would make Bernie Sanders look like a pre-9/11 conservative in comparison, I absolutely draw the line at having adverts shoved into my face without my ability to stop them, and Tumblr's app crossed that line to clean its shoes on my carpet. I've been using Tumblr exclusively on browsers since then and have had no ideas about going back to the app.
Because, at the end of the day, it's an app. Mobile apps are designed chiefly for data analysis; any other function beyond that is strictly secondary. Pokémon Go is marketing analysis trackware first, a game second. The Tumblr app is an advertising billboard first, marketing analyser second, AI trainer third, and social networking platform in a distant fourth. There is no app currently available from either Google Play or the iTunes app store that is not spyware. We all know this, but going by what I keep seeing on Tumblr, the only thing we're planning to do about it is complain a little bit more. Giant multinational corporations and lesser data-scraping concerns are getting piles and piles of money by selling data about our lives that we supply them in abundance for free while we have to scrimp and save just to come up short at the end of the month. The solution is within our power as the corporate consumer base, and it's so easy: stop using apps! You only need 2 apps: Mozilla Firefox and NewPipe. By going to Tumblr on Firefox, I force the service through the Privacy Trifecta just like any other website. Tumblr isn't the only app whose functions are duplicated by a website, either. But even this 1 simple, painless change is not done.
I can tell this because of all the complaints on my Tumblr dash about something called "head hat boy", before that it was something about an old lady holding a sword, before that it was a man in an unsettling Pikachu costume. I never see any of this because I don't use the app, I use the mobile version of the website. This is basic curation of my personal space. By using mobile websites in place of apps, I may need to turn my screen to landscape and unholster my stylus every now and then, but the number of advertisments I see on a regular basis is 1 or less. Those that slip through the cracks are easy to zap with uBlock Origin.
Here's how useful uBlock Origin is at curating your online spaces... using ONLY IT, I've managed to get FANDOM (formerly Wikia) back to a functional state. Here's a screengrab of The Sims Wiki on FANDOM. Do you see a single advert anywhere? Annoying pushbars trying to trick me into engaging with analytics? Pop-and-play videos? Do you?! No. Because I use uBlock Origin. It doesn't take 15 minutes for the page to load because of all those advertisers bidding for my data, it doesn't lag while scrolling, you can actually FIND the information you're looking for, and it doesn't make my computer's heatsink fan get ready for takeoff, because all that extraneous corporate feudal chicanery got stopped at the door. The point I'm trying to make here is that the few of us who actually do curate our space online in this way aren't doing enough to bring this knowledge to others. I'm only 1 woman with 1 website. Even worse, some of us are actively keeping this a secret, like they're some sort of computer genius. There's nothing secret about it: Firefox, uBlock Origin, LocalCDN, and Privacy Badger.