Remember Maslow? Look at the hierarchy. Instagram is meeting the need of community, the photo sharing is a tool to meet that need. Same thing as Hacker News. We're both here to talk about this stuff, even though forums are a solved problem right?
The world is not just about solving problems. That's actually the part people care the least about. Hence why you can solve the problem of writing code to make an app and get paid peanuts and why the 'Yet Another Photo Sharing App" is paying you to do it.
The topic of this conversation.
Now that it has, and people are starting to buy it, I don't think they're suddenly going to want less of what what they are paying for.
Wouldn't a global and long term perspective include other "not developed" countries entering the "developed" category and this "consumerist bubble" you mention?
It's turd polish around an already solved problem that's been solved a million times over.
The kind of life that ya'll are espousing, this I hole myself in the ground, I run the cheapest shit I can buy, to use low-quality apps that don't let me have any fun, to most people, is actually a very boring way to use the internet and computers in general, and something no one is willing to pay for, hence why no one but those weird few that use computers this way, and the occasional post talking about how they spent all day setting up their mail servers because data privacy ya'll that no one gives a damn about.
It's been solved countless times, and yet Instagram is indescribably more popular than the other options.
In other words, it really doesn't matter if some dev can throw it together in a couple hours because of HTML/JS. What matters is the polish, followed by the users. Notice none of that includes "make it easy for the developer".