I’ve seen the app Apollo as the center of the reddit protest (it was mentioned and cited more than any other app in relevant posts). I’ve also seen many Lemmy clients in development taking inspiration from it.
As a lifetime Android user I’ve never been able to use it, and I’ve never gotten a proper answer to “why not just use the official app?” What made it different from the official application and other unofficial clients that consequently made it so popular among Redditors?
I’m guessing part of why Apollo took a spotlight was the dev being very open in how he was trying to negotiate with reddit and how spez tried to smear Apollo with lies about blackmail.
I never used Apollo, but it’s pretty clear the dev loves making it, and is very communicative with it’s community. Which is great.
The official app is hot garbage.
The other piece about why Apollo was so amazing is more the recognition. It FELT like an Apple app. It navigated the way every native iPhone app did and back when it was new especially had a fluidity that just didn’t exist. More importantly Apple recognized this so much that they themselves talked about it frequently at events, showed off devices with it, and even most recently at WWDC mentioned it as the only social media app. It was a high praised app because everyone recognized the hard work and keen eye that developed it.
I think it became the center of the protest simply because it was the most popular Reddit iOS app and the developer actively spoke out against accusations from the Reddit CEO.
In terms of why it was so popular I can only tell you my own experience which started with bacon reader which like most Reddit apps at the time mostly mimicked the old reddit site. Then I switched to alien blue which used more of the iOS best practices such as larger buttons, swipes, etc. When alien blue turned into the official Reddit app, it became bloated with ads, suggested posts and other annoyances. At which point I switched to apollo which had the similar nice UI without the baggage of the official app.
But honestly I think I only got off the official app because of something annoying with collapsing threads that I have since forgotten.
I could search comments.
What else do you need?
It just has so many unique features. Like sharing a comment or post as a screenshot including a customisable number of comments above it and the post itself. Very useful for quickly sharing or saving comment chains with context, without fiddling with collapsing comments and cropping. Or categories for your saved posts and comments so you could organise. A reminder function built into the app. A subreddit watcher that alerts you whenever certain keywords were posted in a sub. And many more. Lots of things that required more than just developing an app to access an API and display stuff. Gestures were the best I ever used. UI was clean and useful without fiddling with customisation. I was on Android until last year and tried many apps, Apollo beats them all.
But I think it was at the centre of attention because the developer is very responsive and Apollo is the app for Reddit on iOS. On Android you have users spread out across Sync, Boost, RiF, Joey and many more.
The official app is just featureless in comparison. I’m left-handed and you can’t even move the pictures of the posts to the left in compact view so I can access the picture/link/Video without reaching all the way across my phone. Might sound insignificant, but it’s something very simple that every Reddit app I used had and a deal breaker for me.
This is probably the best answer so far that I’ve recieved and makes me understand the situation of redditors much better.
I can’t speak for Apollo but I used RIF and old.Reddit
I work with a bunch of techies with various opinions on this; he said I like “an app that looks like it was from 10 years ago”, which was meant to be an insult, but I think is actually the point: it was text-first, list view, “get out of your way” to enjoy the content.
I don’t like advertising pretending to be content.
I don’t like the integrations that pushed paid crap like their version of Bitcoin.
And I am here because even though Reddit is still active, it’s clear that the ship is being sailed solely by momentum at this point and the company is, well, only going up be able to do so much until they can’t pay what little staff they have. The way the mods and app developers were treated this month was the lowest of the low and sealed my decision.
You may be surprised to learn that reddit has 2000!!! employees. What the hell 2000 people do at reddit, I have no idea.
I swear this number grows by 100 every time I see it lol.
Haha, “an app from 10 years ago” is so true. I kept using AlienBlue through thick and thin for exactly the reason – it’s heavily text focused and all about the comments. No “cards” design or auto-playing videos or what have you.
Apollo was made by someone who used to intern at Apple and it had that feel, imo. It was intuitive, thought-out, and functioned flawlessly. I know you’re an Android person, but take all the positive buzzwords around the Apple product philosophy and apply it to a Reddit app.
The big things and the little things. Lots of gestures - hold on a comment and drag it up and it’ll upvote, hold and drag down, downvote.
You could even have it display the current weather at the top when you were in a location-specific sub.
Apollo felt more like a built in iOS app than some of the actual built in apps
would be curious to hear about it… I usually used web ui and only left reddit because of their approach of dealing with the community. Didn’t personally suffered any inconvenience due to api shenanigans.
My experience with the mobile web was it constantly trying to get me to switch to the app.
This is the end of reddit on mobile for me.
I’ve been using old.reddit since 2008, even after the onset of mobile. The normal UI aka “new reddit” is horrifying and from what I can see the app is the same. There are various features missing in the new web interface as well as various situations where it restricts or lies to you, such as if you’re not signed in and it’s “mature content” or “unreviewed content” and it won’t let you view it - then go to old.reddit and you can view it with no difficulty. But anyway the writing is on the wall that they’re not going to support that interface forever, so might as well give up now.
I know your asking about Apollo but I’m going to be the idiot who chimes in even though I used Reddit is fun. I used RiF because the native app was annoying and slow, I also didn’t want to see full screen images as I scrolled. RiF would give me a clean list of the topics from my favorite subs but not load full screen images so I could scroll through faster looking for the subjects I wanted to read/see at that moment. I just felt like I could find more of the topics I wanted faster than with the native app which also didn’t exist when I started using RiF. I’m using liftoff now and I’m annoyed at the images loading but I imagine there will be something that’s “cleaner” (by my standard) or a way to customize liftoff.
Try swapping on the Compact view in settings. That might be more what you’re looking for
Connect for Lemmy jas both card and list view, and an amoled theme. It’s not 1:1 with RiF, but it’s close enough for me to keep rolling by putting it in my muscle-memory spot.
Apollo was big in the headlines because its developer was the most vocal about the API changes.
As for why people used third-party apps, it’s mostly a preference thing. Something to note is that reddit didn’t always have an official app. Everyone using reddit before 2016 had to use a third-party app if they wanted to use reddit on their phone. A lot of the apps we watched get shut down, especially the ones on android (RiF, Sync, BaconReader, etc) have been around for a long time, and had loyal user bases.
Apollo was younger than the official app, but it was likely favored by those who had used Alien Blue (a very popular third-party app for iOS that was bought by Reddit and turned into the official app)
The user experience. It was fast, easy to use, visually appealing, and the actions were intuitive. It honestly had everything going for it, and performed better in areas where the official app lacked.
Yes. Apollo had a near-flawless interface. Christian kept smoothing up the experience until it was a dream to use! Because he listened to his users and built in the most popular functionality requests. And kept fixing stuff that broke due to changes outside of his control.
Example: at some point a couple years back, links to YouTube videos no longer consistently worked (some could no longer be played from within Apollo). Christian added a feature so Apollo would open the phone’s YouTube app, load the requested video there, and start playing it.
Also his work to make gifs act like YouTube videos comes to mind. In Apollo you could scrub forwards and backwards in a gif, mute or play the sound where available.
and I’ve never gotten a proper answer to “why not just use the official app?”
After all the astroturfing on reddit, I can’t assume this post is in good faith after seeing this question
Yeah, how many of us spelled out our issues with the official app over and over and over? Power users disliked it.
It was just such a great app. Features such as hiding read posts, auto scroll back when you accidentally scroll to the top of your feed, appearance customizations, and a great dev who took feedback and improved the app based on what people wanted.
The dev.
Reddits objective is to provide a tunnel of ads to its users. The third party apps were created to provide a better interface with reddits content.
Thats pretty much all you need to know.
To get the full context you’d have to go back through the history of 3rd party apps on reddit which is… a long story spanning years. Part of it is about accessibility and adequate mod tools (which 3rd party apps are built to support / official reddit pretty much doesn’t)
But the point is that this was the final conflict in a long saga for a small but extremely active group of redditors including a huge number of mods. Reddit might not have lost the rest of us if they played the game it cleverly and with some tact.
I was personally pretty comfortable, apathetically doomscrolling the fromt page. But then my attention was directed towards the man behind the curtain. The writing is on the wall with the mod removals, reddit created cryptocurrency, and the sheer number of ads. It was clear I needed to remove myself from that space.
I had never heard of their crypto but just looked it up. Only article I see is it being in trial phase years ago, did they abandon it? Or did I just never notice?
