Sync for Reddit

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

~ the obit ~

the first time i paid attention to sync for reddit was the june 2023 api shutdown wave, which is true for most people outside its actual user base. it was an android app, built and maintained by a sydney developer who went by ljdawson, started as a side project in 2012 and grown over a decade into one of the two dominant third-party reddit clients on android alongside reddit is fun. the paid pro tier added a few features and removed ads. the free tier was generous enough that the install count crossed a million on google play long before the end.

the june 2023 cause-of-death has been written about extensively because it killed an entire category at the same time. reddit announced new api pricing on 31 may 2023 that would have charged the developer something on the order of twenty million dollars a year to serve sync's existing user base. apollo on ios ran the same math and arrived at the same conclusion. reddit is fun followed. boost, baconreader, relay, and a long tail of smaller clients all shut down inside the same window.

sync for reddit went dark on 30 june 2023, the day the new api pricing took effect. ljdawson posted a long farewell on reddit's r/redditsync thread describing the decade as a labor of love that he could not see a path through. the app no longer fetches content for any of its remaining installed copies. the brand was finished there.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how the api killed it ~

reddit's official explanation was that ai training scrapers were pulling free api traffic without paying, and that the new pricing was aimed at those scrapers. the side effect was that any third-party app whose users made more than a small number of api calls per month became uneconomic at the new rate. apollo's developer christian selig published the math on his end and the numbers matched what sync was looking at. there was no version of the new pricing that worked for a paid-tier indie client.

the reddit blackout protest in mid-june 2023 was a community response to the same announcement. thousands of subreddits went private in solidarity with the third-party developers and against reddit's communication style during the rollout. reddit did not blink. the api pricing took effect on schedule and the third-party android-and-ios client ecosystem was wiped out across that single week.

~ the long tail ~

ljdawson kept the redditsync.com site up for a while after the shutdown with a goodbye message, then quietly let it lapse. some of the same team energy went into other social-media client projects that did not get the same traction. the reddit-client category itself is effectively dead for any client outside reddit's own apps in 2026, because the api pricing wall has not moved.

sync for reddit's place in the obit list sits next to apollo, alien blue, and reddit is fun, all four lost on the same calendar week to the same policy decision. for a decade the third-party reddit ecosystem was where the platform's best mobile interfaces actually lived. that whole tier is gone now and reddit's own apps absorbed the user base that did not leave the platform entirely. sync was the android half of the loss.

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