Given the strong genetic link between wefwef and Apollo, I think it would be great to acknowledge and describe the origins of wefwef’s UX design. In a few months, there will (hopefully) be new signups who never used Reddit, and never had the opportunity to use the awesome piece of software Christian developed over the better part of a decade. I’d like to see the legacy and history of Apollo live on, even if it’s just that iconic icon and a few sentences.
Maybe we could have an “Ode to Apollo” somewhere under the settings menu?
I’ve been wondering the same myself. Lots of the new apps popping up aren’t just heavily influenced by the functionality of Apollo, they’re directly cloning things like the icons, and the text in certain scenarios like when there’s no comments on a post and it says something like “it’s quiet.. too quiet” or something like that. And when you view a comment and there’s a banner at the bottom saying it’s a single comment thread. The syntax is identical.
I’m not complaining because it really has made the transition to the fediverse very easy. But I know Christian put literally years of work into Apollo and I don’t want to feel like new developers are ripping that off.
Unpopular opinion: I feel like Apollo started getting worse once the Pixel Pals were added.
They were cute, for sure, and I understand why he did it, but I noticed a lot more weird bugs that made the app basically unusable some days, and it ended up driving me to another third party app.
I never enabled them, so I never really noticed. I didn’t feel like the app got noticeably worse. If anything, I got more comfortable with Apollo year after year and the old desktop site I was so familiar with was becoming less appealing over time.
I do understand how, after maintaining the same app as his main gig, he would want to work on something else after almost a decade - especially something with mainstream appeal. There are young folks in my family who got Pixel Pals (the standalone app) after seeing their friends have them. That’s huge.
I hope he does come back eventually to make some Fediverse stuff.
Wasn’t the source of a lot of it the random undocumented changes Reddit kept making to their api? That’s my recollection of the various video and gifv bugs at least. Those were the only ones that were super annoying to me anyway.
My only disappointment from Christian is waiting for years for the mythical iPad update. :(
Unpopular opinion: I feel like Apollo started getting worse once the Pixel Pals were added.
They were cute, for sure, but I noticed a lot more weird bugs that made the app basically unusable some days, and it drove me to another third party app.