1y ago

What was so special about the Apollo app?

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?

73 comments

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)

It wasn’t anything super hard to understand. It just worked well and eliminated a lot of crap while focusing in on the most core parts of the experience. It was also a very pure iOS design, conforming to the iOS app guidelines that help it match the UI expectations of iPhone users. Apple’s design guidelines are stronger and better adhered to so there really isn’t a good analogue for Android, where different manufacturers all do different things.

It was the first app that made Reddit easy on an iPhone. I wasn’t a Reddit user, I was an Apollo user.
Christian had a great rapport with his users. We felt like we were in a journey together with a guy who really cared about what he was doing.
And the app itself was really really fabulous. Great features. Well organised.
I’m confident the devs at Wefwef or Mlem will look at Apollo as a template and make the fediverse happen quickly.
Ease of use is key.

It just worked. You could swipe to vote and to comment. You had the ability to read messages mid thread. It looked good. It was also the spiritual successor of alienblue, an app that was well loved and bought out by Reddit to make their official app which retained very few similarities.
And beyond all that the dev worked hard, communicated with users, and was extremely up front about how Reddit screwed him over with the API change. He’s the one that Huffman accused of threatening Reddit. The other app devs didn’t record their interactions with Reddit.

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.

Honestly I'm more of a Sync guy, but I have tried Apollo when I switched to iOS for a little bit. While I did enjoy it I actually enjoyed Slide more because I liked the gestures a little better. iPhones are pretty popular (at least here in the states), and Apollo is the the most popular 3rd part app, so it make sense that it'll be the one you hear about the most.
- The great thing about Apollo is that you can customize the gestures.

Its got a sleek and easy to use UI, is jam packed with features like customisable gestures, no ads, a great media player and (I think) lots of accessibility features.
It’s also wonderful that the dev loved his app and continually updated it
- And the Dev was always listening to his users. He’d even personally reply to people on email.
  He was just a good dude. He was the anti-spez.
  
  He was even better than that - not many people realised he purposely allowed free posting from Apollo to Reddit groups related to depression, suicide, addiction etc.
  Normally you had to pay for Pro sub in Apollo to be able to post, but he didn't want to create any barriers for people seeking help so allowed the free app to post to those subs.
  
  we even had a bunch of chats on twitter about random things, animals rights, electric scooters and all that. Just a really good dude.
- This right here. Someone showed me wefwef the other day, and it feels like Apollo if you want the experience. Definitely my favorite mobile app for the fediverse.
  
  I’ve been losing my shit over Wefwef honestly, shit is really amazing, especially for a “side-loaded” app on a relatively small service, especially compared to the native reddit app. I’m excited for more features to come, and specifically that there’s just no ads on it, and shit scratches that itch that my iPad baby ass needs. More than anything, I just cannot get over how it allows you different experiences across these connected instances like kbin.social or sh.tjustworks, like an actual full link aggregator, compared to a single continuously self contained site feeding you it’s own content. The link to it is wefwef.app works for Apple and Android
- Except for delivering the long promised iPad update haha

The dev.

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.

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'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 all boils down to the state of the official reddit app.
I switched to iPhone from Android (regrettably) not long ago, and Apollo honestly wasn't really better than other third party Android apps I had before, I even liked it less.
I used the official reddit app for years until I tried third party apps and found them better, and when I switched to iPhone I tried the official app first and it was barely usable. Especially that god awful video player that never seemed to work properly, and even when it did it just wasn't good.
So as soon as you factor in the fact that the vast majority of Americans own iPhones, it all makes perfect sense.

Long time android person that used sync a looooong time. I did a stint with an iPhone and felt bad because I actually preferred Apollo over Sync. The interface and app as a whole just felt more polished. Sorry lj!

Go to wefwef.app and try out the PWA clone of Apollo for lemmy 😉
- OMG! I did it right now out of curiosity and a bit cautious and it’s a web app that looks and behaves like Apollo!! What’s this magic?? It works incredibly well! Thank you!

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?

Good news. You can instal Wefwef and get the Apollo experience on android now. Give it a try and see how awesome it’s been for us iOS users
- I can't seem to find wefwef in the play store. ~~Is it there or does one need to side load it.~~
  I'm dumb. You gotta go to ~~the GitHub and go to the app in the web~~ https://wefwef.app and "install" it.
  It seems to think my account on Lemmy.world doesn't exist and won't load posts.
  
  You might want to try it again. A lot of Reddit alternatives have been struggling to keep up with the influx of new users.
  You may also need to verify your email address. I had issues getting logged in when I created my account but I was using Mlem at the time.
  With all of that said, I’m using wefwef right now.
  
  It's a PWA: https://wefwef.app
  
  Sorry about being vague with the instructions. Yeah it’s a bit of a different experience, and with Lemmy.world being down for a few hours today, I just saw this

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.

I could search comments.
What else do you need?

It was great! A simple and beautiful UI, packed to the brim with features for the hardcore user but yet still very easy to use for noobs. It made navigating Reddit a joy and it was constantly updated. You could clearly see it was a labor of love from the developer.

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.

It's the same reasons why many people on Android swore by other third-party apps like Sync, RIF, Joey, Relay, Boost, etc: they're all better than the official app, running way faster and with far more features and customization options to make browsing Reddit actually a smooth and fun experience.

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.

It was one of the most well polished apps I’ve ever used. It was constantly being improved without changing the core of what it did.
Think of it as an Apple product. It did loads of clever things in the background, powerful and easy to use while maintaining a slick aesthetic. The content was the style and the UI was satisfyingly plain. It never broke.
Media player was great and No ads ever.
Lots of gestures to make it simple and quick to browse Reddit. My favourite was the swipe to the right to hide all the posts I’d seen above.
I could go on.

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

Once upon a time there wasn’t a good Reddit app for iOS with usability and accessibility like the rest of Apple’s ecosystem. Then comes along Alien Blue, which kicked ass. After a while, Reddit buys Alien Blue and ruins the UI. Apollo then clones Alien Blue and starts improving on it. Apollo quickly became the only way I would use Reddit on my phone. It was a better client than anything Reddit has come up with on their own - I’d wager their official app is unusable for many people.
Memmy is great alternative to Apollo for iOS.

I used the official Reddit app for a long time, but I ultimately switched to Apollo for three reasons.
Firstly, Reddit collects a lot of data through their official app. I’ve been slowly working on controlling my digital privacy, so the official Reddit app had to go.
Second, the official Reddit app is littered with ads. This really does hurt the user experience.
Lastly, once I started using Apollo I fell in love with how customizable it is. While I don’t have anything against the official Reddit app’s UI, I much prefer being able to customize it to my liking.
As for why Apollo got so much attention, it mostly comes down to its popularity and just how transparent its creator has been throughout the entire API fiasco.
- When I got my iPad I initially used the official Reddit app, having used it on Android, but then I went and got Apollo since it was advertised everywhere on the App Store. Apple seemed to really like it in particular.
  And yeah, they were right. The user experience is so much better on Apollo than it is on the official app. Personal favourite feature was the ability to share an image of the post/comments you want, it made screenshotting comments a lot easier on the iPad.
  Oddly enough, I saw some bootlicking "cope-and-seethe" type (apparent) right-wingers trying to muddy the waters on the eulogy post. If that is the future of Reddit then I'm so glad I'm gone from there and glad Apollo won't be a part of that.

Looks like you are lucky one. Times when reddit client on android just goes "Something went wrong" when playing video is enourmous. And even if in video plays, it's not guaranteed that you'll have the sound even if there is sound in the video. I don't know if Apollo was as great as they say, but rif was a life saver. It had nicer ui overall and also was less buggy.
- Apollo’s video and gif player was so good. Scrub anywhere you want, fast loading, and compared to the official Reddit app — it actually worked.

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.

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.
- 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.
- 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.

When I was still on Android I used to use Slide for Reddit and later Reddit Is Fun (RIF) as the official app was just full of ads and lacks so many customizability options, and later it started pushing content I wasn't even subscribed to. (I kept an eye on it) also it showed ads in the interface, despite me having reddit gold or premium or whatever they called it.
Then 2 years ago I got a second hand iPhone to play with and found Apollo which, while not like RIF, was a great app to browse reddit with. Speedy, responsive, customizable, a great image viewer and video player and with Apollo Premium, no ads.

I don't really know. I had an iPad for a year and I had to keep using Apollo for images and Narhwall for text. Nothing could replace my beloved Relay

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.

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