Apollo Shutting Down June 30th
Christian Selig (tweet, Mastodon, Hacker News, MacRumors):
I’ve talked to a lot of people, and come to terms with this over the last weeks as talks with Reddit have deteriorated to an ugly point, and in the interest of transparency with the community, I wanted to talk about how I arrived at this decision[…]
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Another common claim by Reddit is that Apollo is inherently inefficient, using on average 345 requests per day per user, while some other apps use 100. I’d like to use some numbers to illustrate why I think this is very unfairly framing it.
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Hopefully that illustrates why, even more than the large price associated with the API, the 30 day timeline between when the pricing was announced and developers will be charged is a far, far, far bigger issue and not one I can overcome. Much more time would be needed to overhaul the payment model in my app, transition existing users from existing plans, test the changes, and have users update to the new version.
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I was assured this year by Reddit not even that long ago that no changes were planned to be made to the API Apollo uses, and I’ve made decisions about how to monetize my business based on what Reddit has said.
Apparently in a conversation with moderators, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman alleged that Selig was attempting to threaten the company into paying him millions of dollars. Unfortunately for Huffman, Selig has receipts—namely recordings of all his dealings with Reddit.
I gotta be honest, this Huffman guy sure looks like a lying creep, and all of Reddit’s public statements about honoring third-party apps seem like an attempt to lie to Redditors so they don’t look like the bad guys.
I speak with Christian Selig (former Apple intern turned star indie dev) on why and how Apollo’s $20M API maintenance fees are a no-go and how Reddit’s changes will make the site worse for everyone.
Reddit announced they were raising the price to make calls to their API from being free to a level that will kill every third party app on Reddit, from Apollo to Reddit is Fun to Narwhal to BaconReader.
Even if you’re not a mobile user and don’t use any of those apps, this is a step toward killing other ways of customizing Reddit, such as Reddit Enhancement Suite or the use of the old.reddit.com desktop interface.
This isn’t only a problem on the user level: many subreddit moderators depend on tools only available outside the official app to keep their communities on-topic and spam-free.
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On June 12th, many subreddits will be going dark to protest this policy.
When a site tells you they don’t want you using it, except by their captured clients, you should stop using it. All they want is to control you and put ads in your eyeballs, until you explode.
That happened for me years ago with Twitter. It happened before that with MySpace; I know it sounds like a joke now, but if you liked music and web design, MySpace was a fantastic place to meet people. And before that, there was LiveJournal; now owned by Russian criminals. Reddit came out of Digg being fed into a woodchipper just because Kevin Rose wanted a little bit of money. I dunno what keeps a billion people trapped in Facebook, but they’ve never had open clients, those people like being property.
Previously:
Update (2023-06-09): See also: Hacker News.
This makes me indescribably sad.
Apart from mourning the loss of a fantastic app by an awesome developer, to me it signals the end of a golden era of small indie client only apps. Since the APIs for the likes of reddit, twitter (RIP tweetbot) and others were available for free or a reasonable fee it spawned a whole cottage industry of developers who made a living selling alternate front ends for these services. These apps invented many of the conventions and designs that eventually percolated to the official clients. Sometimes these innovations even became platform wide conventions (pull to refresh anyone?). The writing was on the wall for a while, but now the door is firmly closed on that era - and we will all be poorer for it.
It’s interesting that despite pretty different cultures, Apple, Twitter, and now Reddit seem to share a strange resentment towards their platform’s developers. They seem actually incapable of viewing the relationship as symbiotic or mutually beneficial in any way, demonstrating through words and actions that they consider it a favor to devs that they should get any access at all, not that users benefit from this too. It feels almost personal. Is this a natural phenomenon for platform owners?
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The strangest part is that it also hurts their business. It’s not about throwing us a bone IMO, it’s about not understanding how much better their service is thanks to things like 3rd party clients. I don’t even use Apollo, but I understand how it’s indespinsible to the mods that actually keep Reddit usable. Most the apps I use on the iPhone are not made by Apple. Yet they act like the AppStore is a charity that they’re one “whiny developer” away from just closing down entirely.
With what happened with Tweetbot et al, and now Apollo and the Reddit clients, more than ever my advice to new developers is own your dependencies, wherever possible. It is far too easy to import a dozen Swift packages without thinking. A lot of people are getting very excited about OpenAI APIs like GPT, but build with caution — it is but another major dependency being introduced to many apps that would cause existential problems should it some day go away, or price you out of the market.
nightofgrim (via Hacker News):
The goal of making the code for this repo available is to show that despite statements otherwise by Reddit administrators, Apollo does not scrape anything and users purely authenticated Reddit API requests, and does a great deal of work to ensure the Reddit API rate limits are respected.
deliteplays (via Hacker News):
Programmer Humor will be shutting down indefinitely on June 12th to protest Reddit’s recent API changes which kill 3rd party apps.
BananaBus43 (via Hacker News):
ArchiveTeam has been archiving Reddit posts for a while now, but we are running out of time. So far, we have archived 10.81 billion links, with 150 million to go.
David Brownman (via Hacker News):
Reddit does have a feature to export your data into a GDPR archive, but it’s pretty barebones - only the plaintext of the comment, the subreddit name, the timestamp, and weirdly, the number of awards. Unfortunately, the highest fidelity data comes from the API, which is exactly what’s going to be changing/worsening soon. So it felt urgent to create an archive of my personal API data.
Effective July 1, 2023, the rate for apps that require higher usage limits is $0.24 per 1K API calls (less than $1.00 per user / month for a typical Reddit third-party app).
Some apps such as Apollo, Reddit is Fun, and Sync have decided this pricing doesn’t work for their businesses and will close before pricing goes into effect.
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Effective July 5, 2023, we will limit access to mature content via our Data API as part of an ongoing effort to provide guardrails to how explicit content and communities on Reddit are discovered and viewed.
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We want everyone to be able to use Reddit. As a result, non-commercial, accessibility-focused apps and tools will continue to have free access.
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We need more efficient moderation tools, especially on mobile. They are coming.
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P.S. old.reddit.com isn’t going anywhere[…].
How will you determine which apps are “accessibility” apps? For example, many people use alternative, third-party Android apps to gain access to Reddit, since your own app is appalling with screen readers; but these are not strictly “accessibility” apps.
Can you promise that accessibility apps will be exempt indefinitely? Or only until you put a small level of accessibility into your own app?
Why can’t we have commercial accessibility apps? Why do they have to be operated like a charity? If I can afford to buy an accessible Reddit app, why can’t the developer make money for their work—thus also giving me the ability to have higher expectations for that app? And what about if there’s a cost to them for some features, such as push notifications?
I’ll bet many of you reading this, even Reddit users, couldn’t recall Reddit’s CEO’s name before I named Huffman above. But it’s clear from Selig’s description — and his receipts, as it were — that Huffman is intimately involved in this decision, and is not only responsible, but is actively besmirching Selig with provably false accusations of both extortion and shoddy engineering.
Well, I remember that time Huffman used his super admin access to edit other people’s Reddit posts that were critical of himself.
Let’s see if Huffman has the courage to go through with this planned AMA today to discuss Reddit’s API policy changes. I have one simple question for him: What do you think Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz would say about this if he were still alive?
And I remember that time they removed the listing of Swartz as a co-founder.
It’s crucial to understand that all BigCos are massive liars. The Reddit lies are not unusual; what’s unusual is a company getting caught red-handed.
The developer of Dash caught Apple in a lie with a recorded phone call a number of years ago. They all lie. In fact, Phil Schiller himself lied about my former employer back when we had an App Store dispute.
Previously:
