Gaming

If you're a gamedev trying to make a decent mobile game, you're competing on all the usual fronts like price and perceived quality, but competing for attention has gotten a whole lot harder when [arbitrary card game] has a hour of dailies, [arbitrary gacha game] always has a special campaign going and [arbitrary fake gambling game] is about to have its battle pass end and they're only halfway through. And that has gone up by so, so much over the past decade. It was never good but it's gotten absolutely egregious. At this point, even any generic snake clone will have a battle pass.

Every person that ends up committed to a couple of those long-term-commitment games ends up having much less time for other games. And they make a lot of money, which means they also end up having a hell of a marketing budget.

Sadly because it works, mobile gaming is bigger money-wise than PC and consoles combined, all because people are susceptible to short term dopamine hit your can buy any time, it's a part of what we call enshittification, making the product less user friendly and make more money, shareholders are happy, your don't have to

The short answer is, because they make money.

The good ones are mostly pc ports (dead cells, stardew vally)

You get what you pay for. If you download a free game, then of course it's going to be full of pay-to-win microtransactions. Although there are issues with greed in some larger games run by big companies, the reality is that game devs deserve to earn a living too, and that means at some point a game needs to be paid for.

There are still plenty of good quality mobile games out there, they just don't tend to be free to download. Back when I had more free time, I actually got good usage out of the Play Pass on Android, which was £5 a month and gave me access to a catalogue of excellent mobile games with no microtransactions at all, the vast majority of which were single-player, offline games. Literally the only reason I'm not still subscribed is I just don't have time to play mobile games at the moment - the chances of me subscribing again over the summer when I'm not at uni is high.

Have they ever been good? The sad thing I can tell you as a mobile dev(not game though) is that people on Android don’t want to pay for apps or games, on iOS it’s a bit better but still way worse than PC or PlayStation. There’s also rampant piracy on Android, both from users but even more so from shady app clones Google ignores. As a result free to play, always online with microtransactions is basically the only way to make money

Nowadays

Lol they've always sucked.

The only good games on phone are now emulators and a few Foss games

Always has been.

bang

Fdroid app store has a lot of frankly amazing indie games.

Pirate ~freecell~ Solitaire. is fantastic.

Also, Warframe has an iOS version(not a port), is working on an android version, and its now fully crossplay compatible.

Super Auto Pets

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.shatteredpixel.shatteredpixeldungeon

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.grimdev.grimquest

They are out there but I struggle to find good ones.