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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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