Apollo for Reddit

» see apolloapp.io as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

i was on reddit during the apollo years but i used reddit on a laptop in a browser, not on an iphone. apollo's reputation reached me anyway, the way every macstories review and every ios power-user thread mentioned it as the gold standard. by 2022 it was just the noun for "good reddit client". christian selig was the one-person developer behind it, based in halifax, working on apollo full time after the app paid enough to quit his job.

the launch was october 23 2017. the design copy was straight ios-native, swipe gestures everywhere, jump bar for fast subreddit switching, custom themes, image and video viewers that did not lag. apollo also had a paid tier called apollo ultra with cloud-synced filters and an ai-generated tldr feature. the business model worked, it was not a charity, selig was making real money from real subscribers.

april 18 2023 reddit announced that the public api would move to a paid tier. selig did the math: at the announced rates apollo would owe reddit about twenty million dollars a year, against revenue of a few million. the math did not close. there was a conference call between selig and reddit in early june that went poorly enough that selig recorded it and published the transcript. reddit ceo steve huffman accused him of blackmail. selig posted the call audio. the internet picked a side.

~ the record ~

~ the actual end ~

june 30 2023 the lights went out. apollo was not the only one, reddit is fun, sync, baconreader, and rif all shut down the same week. the official reddit app stayed. so did old.reddit.com, for now. selig refunded all active apollo ultra subscribers out of his own funds, somewhere around 250,000 dollars, because he did not want anyone to feel that he had taken their money and left.

~ what got buried with it ~

the api massacre of 2023 was the second one of the year. twitter had already done the same thing in january, killing tweetbot and twitterrific. reddit did it harder and louder. apollo was the loudest casualty because selig was famous and articulate and had receipts. the broader shift is that the open social-graph apis of the 2010s are gone. every platform now charges enterprise rates or shuts the door entirely. the third-party client era is over.

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