It would be even better if app devs weren't pieces of shit making apps whose sole purpose is to gather all of this data to sell to other pieces of shits while skinning their app as a game or other app to trick users into thinking it's worth installing.

Fighting devs being able to make money in this manner is not dissimilar to getting made a drug dealers. As long as users want their product, they will sell the product.

if you think "desktop" operating systems aren't even worse on this, you're very mistaken

That’s not the problem though. The problem is that most apps are malware.

Phones are quite useful.

Just use the browser, it's fine 99% of the time.