it also runs an onboard vpn, which has the side effect of blocking ad tracking requests.

I like the adblock VPN and the browser UI, however, in the browser itself, I was surprised to see what third-party requests are “loaded to prevent site breakage”, Google and Facebook usually amongst them.

Makes perfect sense. This comment just made me realize English does not have a distinction between order and request. While, for example, in Russian, orders are said in indefinite tense (?). So when you order a dog to sit, you would say “to sit!” (сидеть!), or to order someone to stop, “to stand!” (стоять!). Another less formal way to order (usually a group) is to use “we” as the subject, for example, “[we are] not sitting, [we are] working” (не сидим, работаем)

Free, sure. There is only one app that does it, with huge dependency on Google and/or carrier (whoever runs the servers), which could just… stop working one day, like it did for me.

What specifically do you mean? If you are asking about you = u, to = 2, OK = k, and such, it’s text speak - faster to type and can fit more in 140 characters (SMS character limit IIRC)

But I agree that there is no reason to use those, especially on non-mobile devices.

Large companies can do / have done that (dumping) to drive out smaller competition.

Small companies usually cannot afford this.

Unless you can pitch this as a disruptive idea to gullible investors (looking at all tech startups that burn trillions without making profits)