In my opinion Apollo retains the biggest flaw of the reddit redesign, which is sad:
By making the post body, and especially pictures, the first class citizen you incentivize all the wrong things:
* It is inviting to mindlessly scroll
* Attracting karma is paramount: The game is "upvote this in the 2 seconds I am spending scrolling past it or not"
* This in turn incentivizes shallow posts, strong, polarizing messages with no depth
At the same time, the mechanisms why I use(d) reddit over all the other escapism-in-a-bottle platforms are all discouraged:
* Reading comments, engaging in discussion. You don't even have to open the comment section anymore, so why would you? And if, you will only ever read one or two top comments, inviting the same lowest common denominator battle as with posts themselves.
* Building community, in-depth analysis, being exposed to alternating view points. Well, no place for that in the framework of rapid swiping and shouting in the void.
Good job on the Apollo team to at least include what they call "compact mode" (showcased about a second in the promo video), but the problem with these effects is that they are negatively affecting quality overall, whether or not you as a individual choose to sidestep them.
I hope a new community aggregator like the old reddit will arise soon...
Yo, Apollo dev here. FWIW there's no team, just me.
To answer some of these, Apollo was created well before the Reddit redesign, I started working on it back in 2014.
I'm not sure I 100% understand the criticism though. Inviting you to scroll through an app is a pretty normal thing, isn't it? What's the alternative?
I'm gathering you'd prefer more of a comments-focused experience rather than one focused around the posts themselves specifically? I've been on Reddit for over a decade, as far as I remember the posts have always been paramount and what attract people to the site, even though the discussions are great too. They're just a tap away. As you mentioned you can go into compact mode, then disable the thumbnails and you've basically got Hacker News, haha.
Your criticism seems like more of a comment on Reddit as a platform/community rather than a specific app (though I'm not sure what you mean by "old Reddit", Alien Blue?), but if I'm wrong about that I'm happy to hear any criticism.
I don’t agree. Apollo makes it so much easier to read comments than reddit.com does because of its design choices and the way it handles collapsed comments.
I also write longer comments when I’m using it.
The “skimability” of the posts you scroll through depend so much on what you subscribe to. I don’t have that issue due to what I read on there. I don’t think it’s Apollo’s place to make photo subs or askreddit harder to scan.
I think the age of a mindfull, usefull Reddit are gone. It’s been trolls and crap content for years now, and it’s only getting worse IMHO. I think at some point the usefull, good communities will migrate somewhere else in the coming years
Apollo is honestly the only way to tolerate reddit on iOS (despite all the shortcoming everyone has pointed out). But the most interesting thing about Apollo is the dev's tight feedback loop with his users. Apollo's subreddit has activity that most indie developers can only dream of, and it's well deserved too; Christian goes the extra mile to interact with his users and constantly takes their input into account.
Not only is Apollo the best Reddit app for iOS, it might be one of the best 3rd-party iOS apps out there, period.
It’s incredibly well-designed, very fast, and it’s updated very consistently. Christian, the developer, is a former Apple guy, and it shows — the level of attention and care he puts in is unparalleled.
I’d love a hand-curated (by someone with good taste) list of apps of this quality. Anyone know of one?
Bear app for notes, and also see recommendations on thesweetsetup.com... my only grip with bear is it’s iOS only, no web access even. I didn’t care until my iOS and mac both died during travel and i couldn’t use bear from droid or linux
What’s an example of a well designed app that’s cross platform and not limited only to iOS? Is there a tradeoff between multiple platforms and attention to detail?
This is possibly my most-uninstalled app because it makes reddit too addicting for me to handle.
Its popularity is certainly a comment on the problems with overly JavaScript heavy web apps.
Apollo’s biggest weakness is notifications. They don’t appear as quickly as they should and, for me, chat notifications don’t come through at all. I don’t prefer chat, but I’ve noticed an increasing number of users will open a chat with you instead of messaging you now.
It also doesn’t support having multiple “tabs” open at once, although you can sort of hack it by using the main tab and the search tab. Hoping multiple tabs come to the eventual iPad-optimized release.
But again, great app. Possibly too great for people with limited self-control!
Heya Christian - huge fan of the app. I was wondering if you could share some of your journey / early designs for the app? It’s one of the most well designed mobile apps I’ve used and I’d be curious to see how it evolved in your mind.
I’ve been using it for (if memory serves) and I can confirm it’s by far the best Reddit client I’ve ever used. The only (microscopic) downside is that when one navigates to a Reddit link it isn’t offered as an option to open in. But that‘a Reddit’s doing and not theirs. Thumbs up.
If you open the share sheet, there should be an Open in Apollo option in the same place as your share sheet Shortcuts and below most of the other app icons. You have to make one more tap, but it's worth it to not have to deal with Reddit's official mobile website (or worse, the AMP version).
Apollo is cool, but I found myself going back to Narwhal after trying out both for a while. I love the comments on top of the media view for Narwhal, and Apollo hasn't matched that experience. The app looks awesome though, either way they are both amazing apps.
I have completely fazed out reddit from my daily browsing. Unless it is an obscere sub on a niche topic, the posts on there are gamed and manipulated to the front page.
That site has essentially turned into mainstream media with links curated by big companies and special interest groups, with the illusion of community curated content.
It's going to be a shit show this coming election with groups spending tens of millions of dollars on gaming that site
I believe you can disable that behavior by long pressing on a link in Safari and choosing "open in Safari" or whatever. After that it will continue to open links in the browser. (Yeah, they got rid of the more convenient way to do this…)
I rate Apollo highly. Very well-designed, very fast and honestly I won't use reddit in a web browser anymore, specifically because the experience doesn't come close to Apollo. So my hats off to the developer.
That said, one really annoying bug that seems to have shown up since iOS 13, is that on the odd occasion after being on another app and swiping back to Apollo the swipe down to refresh feature just doesn't seem to appear or it freezes when it does appear and forces me to restart the app.
Apollo is really well done, but there’s certain bugs that have been in it since day 1 that are still not fixed (despite reporting them) that kill it for me — namely that “load more” does not fetch the next set of comments in chronological order when sorting by new.
I resorted to trying the official Reddit app and was pleasantly surprised. I assumed it would be way worse, but it’s actually excellent. If you haven’t tried it in a while, I’d recommend it.
Apollo had my favourite feature from any Reddit browsing experience, which was displaying the parent comment of the comment you are viewing if you used 3D Touch. I found this incredibly useful while browsing through long discussions, and it made the experience of reading through comments, which are often my favourite part of using Reddit, so much more convenient than anywhere else.
After Apple removed 3D Touch from their new devices, I assumed that some kind of workaround would be introduced into the app, even if it wouldn’t be as convenient as the old method. But despite seeing it mentioned a bunch of times on the Apollo subreddit, the usually very responsive developer has ignored people asking about it, and no workaround has appeared. It’s still probably the best Reddit app out there, but it’s a real shame to see such a useful feature removed and users ignored.
Installed the app, removed it pretty much right away.
It makes the same poor design choices as the “new reddit” redesign.
For what it’s worth, I still exclusively use the old reddit desktop mode on desktop and mobile. There’s an option towards the bottom of your account settings to make this permanent.
I wish someone would re-make i.reddit.com a bit better. They stopped supporting it and bugs are slowly creeping in. Most notably the infinite scrolling doesn't work very well (for me at least) and my position gets reset when I go back after clicking a link.
[+] [-] blackbrokkoli|6 years ago|reply
By making the post body, and especially pictures, the first class citizen you incentivize all the wrong things:
* It is inviting to mindlessly scroll
* Attracting karma is paramount: The game is "upvote this in the 2 seconds I am spending scrolling past it or not"
* This in turn incentivizes shallow posts, strong, polarizing messages with no depth
At the same time, the mechanisms why I use(d) reddit over all the other escapism-in-a-bottle platforms are all discouraged:
* Reading comments, engaging in discussion. You don't even have to open the comment section anymore, so why would you? And if, you will only ever read one or two top comments, inviting the same lowest common denominator battle as with posts themselves.
* Building community, in-depth analysis, being exposed to alternating view points. Well, no place for that in the framework of rapid swiping and shouting in the void.
Good job on the Apollo team to at least include what they call "compact mode" (showcased about a second in the promo video), but the problem with these effects is that they are negatively affecting quality overall, whether or not you as a individual choose to sidestep them.
I hope a new community aggregator like the old reddit will arise soon...
[+] [-] iamthatis|6 years ago|reply
To answer some of these, Apollo was created well before the Reddit redesign, I started working on it back in 2014.
I'm not sure I 100% understand the criticism though. Inviting you to scroll through an app is a pretty normal thing, isn't it? What's the alternative?
I'm gathering you'd prefer more of a comments-focused experience rather than one focused around the posts themselves specifically? I've been on Reddit for over a decade, as far as I remember the posts have always been paramount and what attract people to the site, even though the discussions are great too. They're just a tap away. As you mentioned you can go into compact mode, then disable the thumbnails and you've basically got Hacker News, haha.
Your criticism seems like more of a comment on Reddit as a platform/community rather than a specific app (though I'm not sure what you mean by "old Reddit", Alien Blue?), but if I'm wrong about that I'm happy to hear any criticism.
[+] [-] 1123581321|6 years ago|reply
I also write longer comments when I’m using it.
The “skimability” of the posts you scroll through depend so much on what you subscribe to. I don’t have that issue due to what I read on there. I don’t think it’s Apollo’s place to make photo subs or askreddit harder to scan.
[+] [-] bnt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hombre_fatal|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] srik|6 years ago|reply
https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp
[+] [-] highmastdon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ftio|6 years ago|reply
It’s incredibly well-designed, very fast, and it’s updated very consistently. Christian, the developer, is a former Apple guy, and it shows — the level of attention and care he puts in is unparalleled.
I’d love a hand-curated (by someone with good taste) list of apps of this quality. Anyone know of one?
[+] [-] nikivi|6 years ago|reply
https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/my-ios
[+] [-] hombre_fatal|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bravura|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bhl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1123581321|6 years ago|reply
Its popularity is certainly a comment on the problems with overly JavaScript heavy web apps.
Apollo’s biggest weakness is notifications. They don’t appear as quickly as they should and, for me, chat notifications don’t come through at all. I don’t prefer chat, but I’ve noticed an increasing number of users will open a chat with you instead of messaging you now.
It also doesn’t support having multiple “tabs” open at once, although you can sort of hack it by using the main tab and the search tab. Hoping multiple tabs come to the eventual iPad-optimized release.
But again, great app. Possibly too great for people with limited self-control!
[+] [-] iamthatis|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjcm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qubex|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1123581321|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snazz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhlsthrm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rickharrison|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NoahTheDuke|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skunkworker|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hprotagonist|6 years ago|reply
I miss the side-pane view that AlienBlue had for iPad, but everything else is great.
[+] [-] x__x|6 years ago|reply
That site has essentially turned into mainstream media with links curated by big companies and special interest groups, with the illusion of community curated content.
It's going to be a shit show this coming election with groups spending tens of millions of dollars on gaming that site
[+] [-] emit_time|6 years ago|reply
I had so many major gripes with all the other reddit apps for iOS, and I tried all the major ones.
I remember using it and dealing with all the bugs, and seeing all the deadline delays etc, never expecting to see it come to light.
Left for a while, and then it was actually released.
And I LOVE it.
Thank you so much iamthatis :)
[+] [-] slipheen|6 years ago|reply
Afaik, ios doesn't provide anyway to forcibly disable that behavior system-wide.
That behavior is a deal breaker for me, so I can't have any official apps installed.
[+] [-] saagarjha|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elm_|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krbzsq|6 years ago|reply
That said, one really annoying bug that seems to have shown up since iOS 13, is that on the odd occasion after being on another app and swiping back to Apollo the swipe down to refresh feature just doesn't seem to appear or it freezes when it does appear and forces me to restart the app.
Just curious if anyone else has had this issue?
[+] [-] berberous|6 years ago|reply
I resorted to trying the official Reddit app and was pleasantly surprised. I assumed it would be way worse, but it’s actually excellent. If you haven’t tried it in a while, I’d recommend it.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mcatis|6 years ago|reply
After Apple removed 3D Touch from their new devices, I assumed that some kind of workaround would be introduced into the app, even if it wouldn’t be as convenient as the old method. But despite seeing it mentioned a bunch of times on the Apollo subreddit, the usually very responsive developer has ignored people asking about it, and no workaround has appeared. It’s still probably the best Reddit app out there, but it’s a real shame to see such a useful feature removed and users ignored.
[+] [-] niknetniko|6 years ago|reply
https://www.reddit.com/r/redditsync/
[+] [-] samcat116|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geuis|6 years ago|reply
It makes the same poor design choices as the “new reddit” redesign.
For what it’s worth, I still exclusively use the old reddit desktop mode on desktop and mobile. There’s an option towards the bottom of your account settings to make this permanent.
[+] [-] skizm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thekingshorses|6 years ago|reply