Fiese Schnüffelei: Meta und Yandex spionierten Nutzer ihrer Android-Apps aus

They are exploiting a legal loophole: technically the law doesn't specify that you have to provide a tracking free version for free. So they don't.

I don't think this would stand up to scrutiny in court, because the law does state that getting a tracking free version needs to be as easy as the alternative and registering is more complicated than clicking "continue with cookies". But so far this is untested conjecture.

It's unfortunately standard practice in Germany. Not sure whether that's strictly legal, but this practice doesn't really get challenged so it might as well be.