I've been wondering why we have such different reactions to free to play games and free software. I know gaming has different value proposition, but free software and services share a lot of similarities. It's not just feeding the creators. There are tricks and "addictions" too. Do you like the free version but want to scale up, remove that restrictive license, or unlock new features? No problem, just pay up a bit. It's no big deal; look at our landing page where you can see other players - I'm sorry, other businesses - who happily have done that. Some even do cosmetics too (we'll show your logo and remove ours in the UI facing your customers).
Is it dishonest? I don't know. But the tactics are similar.
I think the issue is that it doesn't do what it says on the box, or if it does, there are disclaimers in super-tiny print.
I'm not big on games, and even less so on mobile, but I remember that the ones I've tried to kill time during my commute, I could basically play them for 5 minutes if I didn't want to buy gems or whatever.
This, to me, looks much more like the "shareware" / demo versions of old than "free to play". And I think I'd see them in a better light if they were upfront about it.
To compare this with an "open source with paid features" product I'm familiar with, Elasticsearch, they're much more clear about it. At the time, it didn't even support TLS, no authentication, etc. You were of course on your own if you couldn't figure something out. But you'd know this upfront, and you didn't have to reboot the cluster every 10 minutes or 100 searches.
Is it dishonest? I don't know. But the tactics are similar.