This is from a US small non-profit, and small for-profit operating with way less than $1M in funding, and not necessarily intending to deal with people in the EU context: Not every company has money to pay for the hours to ensure they are GDPR compliant, so they opt out of serving EU clients altogether. It's not always a problem forever, but it's definitely a blocker sometimes.
How is it any different than an EU company complying with Russian/US/whatever laws?
International laws have always been crazy expensive, if anything, being able to (mostly) target quite a big market by only making it EU-aware is more of a plus, than a negative.
That’s the thing: when I come onto a project they might not even know, nor have the hours to allocate to figure it out, and I ain’t working for free to figure it out.
Let me make this clearer: I'm not trying to do anything but work a job. These aren't my apps, and it's not a "me problem", but a them problem. I'm just the third party messenger relaying anecdotes.
Cookie disclosure/consent can be an issue, and again, sometimes companies would rather just not serve EU clients altogether than build a simple disclosure and not set any cookies. Not saying that's good or bad, but that's just what it is.
If you don't want to share what these apps are doing yet insist EU laws are troublesome, you won't be surprised for people to interpret them as doing something unneeded or anti user instead of just some "legal complexity barrier".
The apps could be perfectly fine, its just that people will speculate.
