A different perspective:

I grew up at a formative time. Eternal September was my generation. I took a year off before college but September '93 was literally when I was supposed to start college. As such, I am now an internet billionaire and spent more on hookers'n'blow than you will earn in your lifetime.

(something something roads not taken something something middle-aged regret)

That last sentence isn't true. What is true is that the Internet grew up around me instead of the other way 'round... and by the time the iPhone came out I was on my 5th "smart phone."

So a few things about "smartphones" that you may not have considered:

1) The Internet sucks on phones. Always has, always will. It really sucked at 240x320 on Windows CE but it was downright unusable on Blackberry. Nobody bothered.

2) Prior to the iPhone, they were commonly called "PDA phones." This is because they were effectively contact & calendar devices that happened to have a cellular radio. Yes, you could browse the Internet but data rates were ruinous, speeds were pathetic and the people who bought them bought them for their utility.

3) the iPhone introduced the "App" ecosystem as a way to deal with this: Apple took one look at the existing languages necessary to render mobile apps (which are so far down the memoryhole at this point that I can't even find mention of them) and decided the way to solve the problem was to front-load all the wrapping and grab only the data you need. Problem: if you're looking at photos on flickr.com, you can browse away to look at something else. In fact, any ads you serve are likely to take you away from flickr.com especially as nobody could run multiple browser windows at once. Solution: build it all into the "app" (which is really just an html wrapper) so that no matter what happens, it happens on your turf.

4) "Engagement" becomes the watchword, rather than CPM, to determine the value of your "app" (which used to be your "site"). There are plenty of ways to design an app such that it sucks your life away. Somewhere there's a brilliant article by a game designer that talks about how Farmville is basically engineered to hit you like heroin. Blizzard shapes their reward curve for Starcraft such that Koreans will play it for their entire available free time, but not so much that they quit their jobs and starve. Basically, if you're in an app you're subject to far more "gamification" than if you're on a page.

5) "engaged" consumers are worth far more than browsers of a webpage and revenues go up. This drives greater "appification" of the Internet as more and more sites become worthless on the web and addictive in your pocket. They're all competing for your attention and they all want more of it than you can spare and they're all getting ridiculous sums of money for doing things that are fundamentally bad for you.

So that's where we are now: instead of an internet that connects you to information, we now have a million little sandboxed apps all competing to be your drug of choice. If the neighborhood didn't go to shit around you, your first experience with a "smartphone" is a lot like an Amish kid on Rumspringa. Except the bars and strip clubs that surround you face no penalties for ruining your life and are remunerated preposterously for giving you heroin. Meanwhile, if you've lived there a while you wonder what's up with the kids with patchy facial hair that can't seem to get enough of the horse.

I don't think it's a steady-state problem. As a culture we're navigating uncharted waters but we're also collectively aware that things are different and not necessarily for the better. Fundamentally, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the rest of the Horsemen do not improve your life. Anyone with a little bit of smarts figures that out eventually. There's a period, though, where the design does what it's intended: hook you on wasting time for someone else's profit.

...Pretty much the same thing you said, except I made it the fault of those Faceless Corporations.