I guess I'm in the opposite camp. I have a drawer of clip-on tuners which broke or ran out of battery which is hard to change or just weren't easy to use or reliable. A sturdy boss tuner somewhere in my drawer of cables that's pain to pull out. And two apps that are on all my devices, easily always accessible at home or friend's, and can tune my guitar my bass and my kids ukulele. I wish I preferred the hardware unit, I do - but the convenience factor of the app is too high. I am not spammed with adware but I assume I paid for them at some point - I get value so I gave them money. My expectation of free apps are exactly what price would suggest. We have a choice between ad supported and paid product. Put your money where your mouth - or rather righteous blogs and comments are.

Edit: google "best tuner apps" and the two I use are consistently at the top. If those aren't in the top 30 of your appstore search, then we have a discoverablity problem, not a free or ad supported software problem. And again, if you picked random tuner from Amazon instead of going to store or reading reviews your experience might be the same. So - let's focus on what true issue / rage is, and compare apples to apples :)