Which moral principle did they violate that would call for the "unethical" label?

<strawman alert> If there is a moral principle that client software developers should respect the scarcity of their users' computing resources, then that's news to me. My experience as a user is that developers have always treated my hardware's memory, storage, bandwidth, and compute cycles as externalities that are free for the taking.

For some reason it feels like experimenting on rats or something. You're like, purposely screwing with people's lives to see what happens. It doesn't feel like it's coming from a place of benevolence.

Why do you say that it's out of touch?

What would be unethical about it.

They took a useful thing that was providing value to people, and broke it for no other reason than to see how people reacted.

I mean, it's not that unethical; that's a big word to be throwing around. It's just kind of a dick move.

> They took a useful thing that was providing value to people, and broke it for no other reason than to see how people reacted.

You're pretty much describing the foundation of science: breakig stuff that's working just to see what happens.

It being science doesn't mean it can't be unethical. I'm sure there are loads of biological experiments we could be doing that most would consider unethical.

That said, I don't think I'd call this particular experiment unethical, because it was a free mortgage calculator app and I can't imagine people depending that much on it. Calling it a dick move seems more apt. Then again, who knows...

Psychological studies, when ethically conducted, are opt-in. The subject knows they are a part of a study and has a choice not to be and nothing about their lives change if they do. Here, it is not opt in, nobody knows they are being subjected to experimentation, and it has impact on the subjects that they did not agree to sign themselves up to.

It's a bait and switch. Unfortunately that is what a huge amount of software has become. From OS updates to app updates everyone wants a direct line to install whatever they want.

Why does a site like reddit want to push their app so badly? What can be done with an app that can't be done on a webpage now and what is so important to something that just delivers text?

Control

Companies push their own apps for control. They are very limited on the types of metrics and tracking that can be done through the browser. By pushing their own apps they become limited only by the operating system itself.

What can be done through an app with only the permissions it needs compared to a web page?