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.
Is Reddit social media? Nobody on there knows who I really am. I try to not post any personally identifying information (and even post purposefully misleading information). In my mind it is just interacting with people online or having an online community that defines social media. It is knowing who the people you are interacting with are in real life.
Reddit is very much social media; I stay psuedo-anonymous there and interact with it much as I would with other platforms, apart from putting minimal effort to stay incognito.
I'd probably same the same for me too, but I think what draws in the average person is the posts on Reddit more than anything, even if the comments are also gems.
I think what makes Apollo great is how closely it integrates with the iOS interface and design language. Its value proposition is that it matches expectations of iOS users and is fast and intuitive on that platform. If you re-wrote it in Electron I think it would become "just another reddit client."
Apollo actually ditches native components in certain places and tries to reimplement their behavior, getting it wrong in some places. It drives me insane enough to use an entirely different app :(
Off the top of my head, Apollo's recreations of the action sheet, search bar, and navigation controller have subtle bugs. The action sheet is missing vibrancy and does not respond correctly to touch in/out events, nor does it give any sort of indication of being scrollable (it also does the "oreo" thing if you switch between appearances). The search bar does not animate correctly when navigating between view controllers and while collapsing has incorrect rounding and shading. It also fails to take user input or respond to touches at all during animations. Your custom navigation controller does not animate titles correctly, and its swipe handling is frustratingly divergent from the system's: it accepts swipes starting almost a centimeter from the edge and is far too sensitive to accidental flicks. Plus, stylistically, it should be using large titles in certain places but does not.
These might seem like minor things, and they probably are for most people, but as an heavy iOS user I have a very good sense for how system components look and function, and it drives me up a wall when people reimplement them but break or fail to support some of their behaviors (specifically: if your custom component is supposed to look like a system control, it better act exactly like one!). As an iOS engineer I also know that these parts of UIKit are the somewhat problematic to deal with, but I appreciate apps that take the time to get it right and I would have hoped that an app that prides itself on looking at home on iOS would have put in the effort to care about this as I do. Hope this helps.
Just to pint out using Electron will be able to allow publish this beautiful application to other systems. Electron not an issue here, vs code is written on it and it's loved text editor for thousands of software engineers which use it every day for several hours.
Started working on it in 2014 then moving to full time in 2015 when I graduated university, then in late 2017 finally released it. :D So been full time about 4.5 years at this point.
Electron wouldn't be a great idea since it doesn't work on iOS. React Native would be something to consider, but I've never been super impressed by any of the results (and it comes with a bunch of issues in and of itself, and to my knowledge isn't compatible with macOS like UIKit is now) so I'd change nothing in that regard.
>Started working on it in 2014 then moving to full time in 2015 when I graduated university, then in late 2017 finally released it. :D So been full time about 4.5 years at this point.
Out of curiosity, when did you work at Apple? Your website says "built by a former Apple employee", but it seems you've been full-time on this app for most of your post-college years.
"In the summer of 2014 during my Computer Science degree I was lucky enough to intern at Apple as engineer on the Enterprise App Development team in Cupertino (long way from Eastern Canada), where I learned an absolute ton from some crazy smart people."
Would love to hear what the big lessons were from that experience if they could be enumerated at all. I jumped directly into working for myself after college and have never held a corporate job. I wonder all the learning I’ve missed out on not being apart of a crazy smart team of people.
Thank you so much for this app. I transitioned from the official one because GIFs were just not working at all. The GIF navigation and post hiding on scroll made me upgrade. If there's just one thing I miss from the official app it's when I'm on my feed and I click "posts" again, it doesn't scroll to the top.
If you considered this small addition that would be fantastic!
As an early and ongoing Apollo user, this is a fantastic app, highly recommended, including all the premium/ultimate/lifetime whatevers. And the periodic swag offerings are great too.
That said, I keep wondering when the iPad design mentioned what seems like ‘years’ ago is coming.
I keep hoping for something like Hack for HN that takes what’s currently a waste of screen width when using Apollo in landscape on iPad Pro (posts take 1/2 screen width, with 1/4 screen width margins on each side, putting the posts just out of reach of your thumbs when holding sides of ipad), and instead puts that list of posts on the left 1/4, and shows comments for a selected post on the right 3/4.
// Separately, for image post subreddits, like /r/EarthPorn/, really should have a mode to simply view photos scaled to full screen and swipe left/right to prior/next photo post, with a tap to see the post title and vote UI as an overlay, push up to go into photo + comments mode.
For the record, I am not trying to hate or anything, scrolling through this thread I think there is some kind of cultural disconnect going on. I personally don't care for the infinite content scrolling of today's content aggregator, so I am sad this trend is reflected in more and more places.
I did a poor job of stating this as personal taste and not as assumed facts. Obviously, you (and a lot of others) use and always did use Reddit in a different way than me. There is of course nothing inherently wrong with serving these needs, especially when done in a much superior way like Apollo does.
If you read this reply, I would just like to urge you to keep the negative effects of excessive escapism, polarization, misinformation and group think in mind when designing features. Cheers!
I love apollo! Only 1 problem and it constantly annoys me. Surprised nobody else has mentioned it:
Why does the comment and post body hide when you single tap? I am scrolling through a long post and my slow scroll registers as a tap. Now it’s hidden. Tap again and I lose my spot.
I think you're talking about two separate things, it collapses when you tap because… well that kinda makes sense, there's a button to tap to collapse on the website so I just made the tap target bigger, there's not much else use for a tap. The second thing where slow scrolling can register as a tap and thus collapse it… yeah that's annoying as hell, I know what you're talking about and I'm working to fix it.
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.
Apollo's collapsing comment UI could be better - there's a shortcut to go to the next root comment, but I don't want to go to the next root comment, I want to go to collapse the current thread and see the next parent or grand-parent comment.
I'm guessing it's because I'm on an older iPhone 7, but Apollo's makes it very hard to write comments. In particular it loses my place when switching from Apollo, to another app to check something, then switching back. A message pops up about having saved the text, but frustratingly, it doesn't re-open the editor, so I have to go find the comment I was replying to and opening the compose reply there.
As to whether or not it's Apollo's "place" to make it easier/harder to scan, that makes no sense. Apollo's already an alternative UI, so it's already interjecting an opinion on the 'right' way to experience Reddit. That you might disagree with, eg making photo subs harder to scan, is a difference of opinion, but Apollo is already in that "place".
This specific behaviour is why I love Apollo. I do this exact thing when skimming through threads -- there's a couple of ways to do what you want to do:
Tap on the top of a comment to collapse that comment and any below it, assuming you haven't turned off "tap to collapse" in settings > general > comments.
Set a gesture for one of the swipe directions to collapse the current thread (I believe this exists, by default, as right-short-swipe) in settings > gestures.
The main struggle with reddit apps are the lack of mod tools. Only Alien Blue and Apollo have a simple method for working a queue. I still prefer Alien Blue's tools in this respect, but a lot of content fails to load with it.
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
The only thing you can really do is unsubscribe from literally everything, and choose much more boutique groups that are related to your specific interests. For example /r/multicopter/ is a half decent resource for quadcopters and various hobby drones, or /r/destinythegame is a useful resource for a specific video game. The page /r/alaskanmalamute is a friendly community of people who own Malamute dogs.
Everything that has millions of random people joined to it has become a cesspool of lowest common denominator clickbait posts and photos.
Trolls and crap content? Aren't you being overly broad here? I find the r/swift and r/iOSProgramming communities pretty informative. And the r/ProgrammerHumor is good for a smile.
ProgrammerHumor used to be so good but I think it reached the front page too many times so now it’s just jokes for people for a passing interest in computers and bad volume sliders. I can’t stand being there anymore…
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.
Yo, Apollo dev here. Could you clarify a bit? There's a setting to make Apollo always use reader mode for websites, and you can create/edit/view multireddits in Apollo as well, I don't think Alien Blue even had multireddit support? (https://www.reddit.com/r/AlienBlue/comments/2kd9yz/does_alie...)
Alien Blue works better than Apollo in reader mode in several very significant ways:
- In AB dark mode there is no white flash! The screen stays black while the page is loading. In Apollo the screen goes white until the page is finished loading.
- In AB the reader mode forces all sites into reader / minimal HTML mode whether or not the website wants to allow reader mode
- In AB the reader mode seems to get more images and other content which is left out of reader mode by websites. It also seems to be less confused by some websites that display something other than the main content when reader mode is selected.
Disappointed that there was no reply to this from the developer. Apparently he either doesn't care about these issues or finds them too difficult to correct!
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!
Thanks, apologies for your loss in productivity. :P Great criticism too, re: notifications being a bit slow, that's something I'm working to improve; being an iOS dev the backend web stuff isn't my strongest programming suit, so I'm working to improve that or at least get someone who knows more to be able to help me there.
Chat's a little trickier, I've talked to Reddit about that and they don't seem particularly interested in granting access to third party devs for whatever reason, even though they have an open API for basically everything else, and they said a few years back they were looking into it.
Is there or could there be a way to disable the Home and All buttons? I find Reddit to be much less of a time suck if I’m going to specific subreddits and reading interesting content, but I often just mindlessly browse All without thinking. I had to remove Apollo from my phone (even though I paid for it!) because I often find myself spending too much time doing nothing. My current solution is bookmarking a bunch of i.reddit.com URLs in Safari, but the experience is really poor.
Thanks for making an app that I used for far too many hours.
I think it would be interesting to disable the infinite scroll and either having a button to load the next page or disable loading the next page entirely.
Never thought about it before, but that makes a lot of sense. The act of choosing to load another page might be enough for me to realise I should have gone to sleep about 2 hours prior.
Hey! I know you’re working on it. I should have mentioned how good you are about community engagement and accepting feedback; we’ve interacted on other channels and a couple of my suggestions got in the app. :)
Refreshing the inbox tab is very hit or miss: one refresh I'll see a message, next refresh it will disappear. Often when I receive a message, going into the chat view does not display the message until after multiple attempts.
I’m a huge Apollo fan and I do not have it installed solely for the fact that the UX is near flawless and I find myself scrolling mindlessly for hours. The Reddit mobile website is trash in comparison so I always leave after a few minutes.
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.
You might find some interesting stuff on the subreddit (https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/); it was in TestFlight for quite a while even before being released.
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.
You could’ve always copied the URL and just opened Apollo. The app detects the Reddit-Link ask you if you want to open the URL inside Apollo. But I’m using Opener too, it’s a great app not only for Reddit links.
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'm working on an iPad app that takes better advantage of what it can offer, for sure. As it stands it's basically a blown up version of the iPhone app with an extra day's work tacked on top, the new version I'm working on is a ton better. :)
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.
Apollo might be awful, but it can't be worse than reddit on the iOS browser, which they deliberately hobble by constantly asking you to switch to app, and logging you out.
Now, if this app removed duplicates of stories and pics that I had seen, that would be great.
Dark mode is still incompatible with monospace code regions, as reported several times in the ApolloApp subreddit; I tried using Apollo yesterday but couldn’t get past this bug (as I read a lot of code on reddit). Please fix this and I’ll buy the app!
Loved Apollo. Great app. Lately, it's gotten stuck re-loading the app on every re-launch for me, after upgrading to premium, making it near unusable (or at least incredibly frustrating) on the iPhone.
I've always thought that kind of business model was a bit questionable. You build a client and show ads on top of someone else's content?
We consider it pretty ridiculous if a browser were to inject its own ads. Yet if you build a client that pulls free content from https://librivox.org/ or podcast RSS and serve it from their servers, nobody bats an eye if you inject ads into it.
Though I'm pretty sure I haven't noticed ads on Apollo off the top of my head. I thought their biz model was to just paywall pro features.
I'm guessing he means the upgrade call to action or release notes (lots of updates to the app so some might consider it an annoyance who knows). BTW, thanks for the app. After Alien Blue died a slow painful death I was lost for a decent client.
Please change the swipe sensitivity for collapsing comments or sending replies or maybe change single tap to collapse. I always trigger replies when I want to collapse.
Edit: found the setting and changed both to collapse (I'm pretty sure it wasn't there before. This app's constantly being polished up)
You're completely right, I was mistaken. Was thinking of other Reddit client's I've tried. It's been a long time since I purchased the full edition so my memory is a bit hazy. Sorry about that.
We consider it pretty ridiculous if a browser were to inject its own ads.
Ridiculous or not, Brave does exactly this.
I don't care, personally. If Reddit wants my eyeballs, they should stop with the user-hostile behavior that's driven me away from the site. As long as they serve an API, I'm in luck, because someone who cares about their users can build a better interface on top.
If they stop doing this, well, no big loss; I have enough ways to waste time.
Reddit's developer terms do have a provision for contacting them with regards to monetizing your app. I recall the developer of "reddit is fun" had a revenue share agreement with reddit.
YouTube for example, prohibits showing any ads on screens that serve YouTube api data, and you will lose api access if they catch you doing that.
Morally, I don't see this as in any way worse than reddit, which is doing the exact same thing, albeit hosting the platform on which people are sharing their content in the first place.
not that i've noticed. Then again, 95% of my subscribed subreddits are highly NSFW in one way or another, so i think that means they don’t have ads on those subreddits anyway.
Reading the comments, I thought I’d jump in to try Apollo again. I recalled it being stifling and yep sure enough, it hasn’t changed:
Basic navigational functionality such as swiping through content from one post to another is not available by default, instead it is behind a paywall.
Look, I totally get if there’s premium functionality such as notifications, better posting functions that you need to charge for it.
But as it exists it has less functionality than the default reddit app in which you can navigate. If you’ve already broken user trust by degrading a basic service I will not trust to pay you for the rest.
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...