BaconReader

» see baconreader.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

BaconReader started as somebody else's app. An independent developer posting as meinhyperspeed had a Reddit client for Android in alpha through most of 2011, and in November of that year OneLouder Apps bought it and put it on the Android Market on 30 November. TechCrunch covered the release under a headline about narwhals, which tells you how deep inside the joke the whole product was.

The app itself was unglamorous and good. Color-coded comment threads and a real inbox, with image previews that opened without leaving the list. It shipped free with ads and $1.99 without them, and there was a Kindle Fire build for the years when Amazon's tablet was the cheap Android tablet people actually bought. Installs passed a million on Google Play.

I knew the icon before I knew the joke in the name. Reddit around 2011 had a password phrase about a narwhal that users were supposed to work into conversation offline to find each other, and it is the kind of in-group signal that curdles about four years later. I read Reddit in those years. The phrase was written for people who posted.

Reddit announced paid API access on 18 April 2023 and published the rates at the end of May, twenty-four cents per thousand calls. Every client in the category had been running on the free tier since it existed. BaconReader came off Google Play on 27 June 2023, three days before the pricing went live, and the copies still installed started answering with an HTTP 429.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the name ~

The narwhal bacons at midnight was a Reddit shibboleth from around 2010, a line you dropped in public to find out who else was a user. It was already being mocked on Reddit itself by 2012. BaconReader took the first half of it and kept that name for eleven years, through two acquisitions and a decade of the site growing into something that would rather not be reminded.

~ who actually owned it ~

OneLouder Apps was a Kansas City shop whose catalog was other companies' front ends. TweetCaster for Twitter and FriendCaster for Facebook were already selling when BaconReader arrived, and the business model was building the app the platform had not bothered to build well.

OneLouder was a subsidiary of Handmark, and on 20 May 2013 Sprint bought Handmark and folded it into Pinsight Media, its mobile advertising arm. From that day until the shutdown, one of the four biggest third-party Reddit clients was a carrier asset. Apollo and Sync were run by the people who wrote them. BaconReader had a reporting line.

~ the last week ~

Reddit's stated reason for the pricing was AI scrapers pulling training data off a free endpoint. The effect on a client at BaconReader's scale was identical either way, and by 2023 nobody at the company that had inherited it had a reason to subsidize a Reddit reader. The Play listing was pulled on 27 June with no farewell thread and no explanation.

Of the four large third-party Reddit clients that died that week, BaconReader is the one nobody wrote a retrospective about. Christian Selig published his call recordings for Apollo and got a news cycle out of it. Andrew Shu posted a shutdown note for Reddit is Fun. BaconReader belonged to a company that had stopped talking about it years earlier, and the shutdown was handled as a delisting.

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