Strange. This inability to select any text has always felt like one of the most hostile things developers could ever do. It feels like pure vandalism.
Another thing that causes massive productivity degradation is not being able to keep multiple pages open so you can come back to some state. I cannot imagine how anyone could possibly use these apps for any serious work.
The UX of almost all native mobile apps is absolute crap. But it's not their nativeness that makes them crap. I'm not complaining about the idea of operating systems offering non-portable but high performance UI primitives that make use of OS facilities.
Many native desktop apps don't have these UX issues (at least not all of them at the same time). It's the mobile UX patterns, conventions and native UI frameworks that are causing this catastrophic state of affairs.
Reddit on iOS was one that did it.
Use Circle to Search? Native capability that works on every single app, and is close to perfect (with the exception of handling text at the very bottom/top of your screen that's covered by your navbar/Google logo).
Even if you could (which you can't, at least on my, modern, phone), it would be a workaround, not a solution.
A solution would be allowing free selection like in the browser or, better yet, ditching "native" apps for web apps, as the person above suggested. As a bonus, this "exodus" will force browser makers to iron out any UX issues very quickly.