To each their own, but I find this decision really misguided.
It's her money, not mine, so whatever, but l do not expect her to turn a profit in, rather the opposite.
In my view, the cross section of "IfR" users and people willing to subscribe monthly is rather small (especially if the money mostly goes to reddit - assuming I could afford it, I, for instance, would rather fund an open system like Lemmy).
And if Apollo's dev Christian Selig decided that it wasn't worth it with an already established paying user base, who already has a strong culture of subscriptions and exaggerated pricings, and one of the highest volume of users, at what probably was the peak usage of the platform; I don't see how a small app like IfR can survive.
That, or Christian made a pretty expensive mistake...
I'm generally willing to pay for a service (I donate to Open Source Projects I regularly use) because of course there are server costs, development costs, etc. But in this case and after all that Reddit has done to its user base it would be a very bad signal to give them money for it...
I like Infinity for reddit and would love to have an Infinity for Lemmy
And even with that subscription, you still get locked out of any post or subreddit that is marked NSFW, which will now be even more since subreddits are still protesting the changes.
cross section of "IfR" users and people willing to subscribe monthly is rather small
Absolutely. I used Infinity for years now because it's open source and on F-Droid. I used it to get away from Google and the Reddit App. Donating for Infinity's developer? Sure thing. Paying money only to finance reddits API policy? For sure not.
It's 'adapt or die' at the moment for 3rd party Reddit apps. I was kind of hoping that the developer would pivot to Lemmy or add Lemmy functionality to the app. Infinity was my go-to app before the apocalypse.
I personally wouldn't try to work with Reddit, if I were a developer, but another factor here is that walking away from a project might be a big risk for someone who doesn't have a backup plan. Christian Selig is a high-profile figure who can afford to walk away from a project. He will be able to rebuild his career quickly and easily, and he knows it. The developer of Infinity likely doesn't have as many opportunities, and may also not feel comfortable taking that risk. I don't know much about her, but if she's not making a whole lot as is, she may legitimately not be able to afford going without an income source for weeks or months. It may be less about making a profit by doing this than about avoiding a catastrophic loss. Selig has admitted he's going to be losing a six-figure amount of money ($250,000, iirc) from shutting down after selling year-long subscriptions. I suspect everyone who has or had a Reddit app looking for alternative income sources, but I don't blame her for trying to make Infinity work for a little while longer.
Unpopular opinion, but I'd consider it if the API provided all the data. I never expected the API to always continue to be free. But making me pay and providing incomplete data? Nah.
This is reddit killing third party apps, because even if you did subscribe you're still not getting NSFW because reddit is taking that out of the API anyways
So who would pay literally more for less? Reddit can say all they want about supporting 3rd party but even the blind could see through them
It's 100% clear that Reddit is trying to kill off third party apps completely so that they can facefuck you with ads and other garbage. The Apollo dev saw the writing on the wall. I can't blame other app devs for trying to squeeze a bit more livelihood out of this, but hopefully they've realized that they need to move on asap. In the end, it's a great reminder to not build your business on someone else's platform, even if they're "cool".
Apparently Reddit doesn't allow the original developer to publish the app with a field for a user API key... but there are tutorials on what to modify to get it to work, and there might be forks out there with the required fields baked in.
You should never pay for for-profit social media, it's fundamentally backwards. Their service is not the product, your contributions and presence are. They are nothing without you, and require you.
The exception is things like instances on the Fedi where it's not for profit and you're putting up a server to include yourself.
Yeah I've used Infinity for over two years, but won't after this update. I couldn't imagine paying money to Infinity only to have it go directly to Reddit. Tbh, I don't think paying money to any non-open, profit-driven social network is a good idea.
There's no way to be profitable with this pricing. Simply no way. Each time an user opens the app it will cost 2 cents in API requests. Continue scrolling, open threads and the costs rises. In average, accounting all the lurkers, inactive and free users, it might look like that it could be supported by a $2 subscription. But then, who is willing to subscribe to an app to read a free website? Only the most addicted users. The ones that will doom scroll for hours. The ones that will do 10000 api requests per day
Also, the server backend must be rewritten from scratch. Right now the app is open source and it's talking directly to the reddit servers using the API key. After the change, it could continue to do so, but because extracting the API key from the APK is trivial, some asshole could extract/crack it and give her a massive bill
Every single request must be proxied by her own server, making a check for a valid subscription to each user and also some quota management. Possibly some caching to save money on the most popular posts. Otherwise it will be trivial for some asshole to make a revanced patch to bypass the subscription. But implement this takes months, she can't have done this and tested carefully in just two weeks
Please someone let her realize this before she gets a massive bill at the end of the month, i don't have a reddit account for that
And what you're going to find too is that as the sub price goes up, the users who use it the least (generating less API costs) get priced out first. In other words, the average cost per user increases because the users who are willing to pay more are the ones who are generating more costs. If 75% of users stop using it because of the subscription cost, the API costs won't fall by anywhere close to 75%.
I mean what's the point. This is all just going to pay Reddit for the privilege of a hobbled 3rd-party app experience (and no NSFW). And we now know how much Reddit cares about you using their API.
You honestly can't blame them for trying to adapt and keep their project going. It's either they start doing a subscription model or Infinity dies. They aren't allowed to make a tutorial for you to just replace their API key with your own, so what choice do they have? (you can do that btw, there are tutorials on the Infinity subreddit, although you're limited to 100 calls a day)
I payed Infinity+ just to support this amazing app. I remember Infinity being one of my first true approached to the FOSS community, "It's free, built by pretty much one person, Reddit is a multimillion dollar company, how can this app be better!?.. But pretty much every penny Infinity makes from now on will go to the greedy Reddit admins' hands so I guess this is goodbye.
Yeeaah I just uninstalled Infinity. It was my go to app for years after Slide fizzled out. Not sure how many users that are into open source will be willing to pay Reddit..
I guess my hope, although knowing it is naive and improbable, is that come 1st of July, the few people that were staying to see If reddit backtracked their terrible mistake, following the shutting down of the 3rd party apps will either stop using reddit all together or slowly begin using it less and less, that much I think will happen.
Then, my hope is, seeing the slow down on content creation, traffic and user interactions reddit will slowly and discreetly, trying to save fuck-spez's face, roll back on some choices or make some concessions to allow 3rd party apps to come back ... But not holding my breath on it.
I know at this point in time, seeing spez dissimisive attitude and knowing it's not on their best interest to look weak or relinquish control of the site to the user base, once the decision was made, they won't go back unless the ramifications are near catastrophic, like losing all together 100% of the people that like me used 3rd party to browse reddit.