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A huge amount of them are.
That said there are a number of games from the flash era that are still great.
There's a lot of good tower defense games. Bloons and kingdom rush I like personally.
Then there's ports like Minecraft, Stardew valley, Terraria
Templar Battleforce is solid.
Most mobile games are toss though, yes. Free mobile games, doubly so.
Commenting in here so I can try out some of the games listed because I have found very, very few games that weren't totally trash - either shit quality or an endless begging for money.
The very few that I do enjoy are Word Feud, The Kingdom Rush series, Flow Free, Block Puzzle and only a few other ones.
Wordfeud is awesome! I had to uninstall it for a while because of the addiction, but I'll be back...
Almost all mobile games and apps are bad. Google Play accepts pretty much anything and is filled with trash
Your sample range of one that you saw out of tens of thousands of existing games means that no, you haven't seen every mobile game and cannot use that one experience to tar all titles. The barrier for entry is low so you will find a lot of rubbish, but there's plenty of gold out there which you maybe be familiar with such as Stardew, Final Fantasy pixel remasters, Slay the Spire, and some not so much, like Yellow, Stumble Guys and Deemo.
Occidental Heroes and Pew-Pew aren't bad
It's tough to find one that hooks you in but not all mobile games are bad..right I'm playing harry Potter magic awakened and it has me hooked
Lots of great games, but as already mentioned the FTP are a mess. I subscribe to the Google Play Pass, which give me a pretty good selection of games with no ads or in-app purchases. Helps protect me from the crap out there so its worth it IMO.
Get yourself GeForce now and a Bluetooth controller, you'll never go back to Android games.
Not exactly the same as what you suggested but I just tried using Steam Link with a Bluetooth controller and it worked surprisingly well. I'm wondering if I could get this working when outside my house using a private VPN server, sort of like my own home version of GeForce now
Gamepass ultimate has the same thing, you can play games on their cloud servers, some are natively controlled, but for the good ones you need a controller.
My wife wanted to spend more time together, got the 8BitDo controller that holds my phone and I play games while she watches her stories. Works well.
Let me introduce you to: Arknights. It's an anime-themed tower defense game, which is unfortunately a gacha but it's generous and well-balanced enough that if you don't want to you don't need to pay a cent, and this is speaking as an F2P player. And don't get me started onnthe story, which is amazing (though the first few chapters are a little dull).
Yes.
I have rarely encountered a game made specifically for the mobile market to be good. There are some ports of, what I call, real games that work well on a phone. There are some open source versions of things that exist on PC that give the same experience on a phone (like OpenTTD being a nice "rip off" of roller coaster tycoon).
There are only two made for mobile games I can even really give praise to: Galaxy on Fire 2. It's as good as those kinds of quick play arcadey space games can be without going full on Elite or Star Citizen. Perfect for a phone. The other was Synapse and I don't even think you can find it anymore. It was, at the time, the only turn-based tactical game like Firaxis' X-Com games. But since both of the newer XCOM games are officially on the phone, it's not a genre devoid of good stuff.
Half the time I hear about a mobile game getting popular or is touted in these kinds of questions threads, it's something like Clash of Clans. Just crap that lets you play for like 15 minutes every 24 hours unless you start shelling out money. 😮💨
Phobies is really good
My controversial opinion is that candy crush is actually brilliant, yeah they want you to buy gold but it's more fun not to. The same goes for a lot of advert funded / in app purchase games - they're fantastic mobile games if you ignore the money option.
Morrowind ports and similar aren't great mobile games, they're great games but candy crush I can pull out my pocket when I'm waiting for a bus and get totally drawn into a few rounds. Airport control is another example, draw lines to direct landing planes and avoid a crash - super simple and repetitive but its complexity grows, cut the rope likewise is a true game in my definition because you learn skills and develop your personal ability beyond just learning game mechanics. They're engaging and enjoyable with a complexity ramp and nice easy to understand ui and graphics - they're everything a mobile game should be.
There are some great horror and story games too, especially the Indy ones
You can have my Word Cookies when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
I would say that most are subpar. If you are looking for a recommendation then I've been playing Orna (search on the play store) forever now and it's a great time. As hardcore or casual as you like with an overall great community and a developer that is active and engages with us.