It’s not just Apollo: other Reddit apps are shutting down, too

Apollo is getting a bit more on the news than the other Reddit apps due to the amount of noise that its community is making (good! it should!), but there are many third party apps going down the drain. For example, a quick search through Android's app story shows me Boost, Infinity, Joey, Relay, Sync, BaconReader, rif is fun, Now for Reddit, RedReader and a lot more. So yeah, it isn't just Reddit Inc. killing another app, it's killing a whole ecosystem of applications.

And every official spokenperson talking about this is being extremely disingenuous. That's a given for Steve Huffman (spez), the guy could as well tattoo "I'm a liar" on his face. But that also applies to other Reddit admins, like FlyingLaserTurtle. Check the table and notice what's going on:

The numbers assume 100 to 345 API calls per day per active user. The official app does ~150 calls in three minutes.
The total annual cost assumes 1000 users. Reddit has 52 million daily users, ~70% on mobile; it should be on millions, but of course "for 1M users you'd pay 8-30 millions dollars" looks worse than "for 1k users you'd pay 'only' 8-30 thousands dollars", right?
Couple the above with how much they're rushing it, on purpose, to not give the developers time to adapt to the API price changes. One month of dev time is almost nothing.

2 comments

Apollo is getting a bit more on the news than the other Reddit apps due to the amount of noise that its community is making (good! it should!), but there are many third party apps going down the drain. For example, a quick search through Android's app story shows me Boost, Infinity, Joey, Relay, Sync, BaconReader, rif is fun, Now for Reddit, RedReader and a lot more. So yeah, it isn't just Reddit Inc. killing another app, it's killing a whole ecosystem of applications.
And every official spokenperson talking about this is being extremely disingenuous. That's a given for Steve Huffman (spez), the guy could as well tattoo "I'm a liar" on his face. But that also applies to other Reddit admins, like FlyingLaserTurtle. Check the table and notice what's going on:
The numbers assume 100 to 345 API calls per day per active user. The official app does ~150 calls in three minutes.
The total annual cost assumes 1000 users. Reddit has 52 million daily users, ~70% on mobile; it should be on millions, but of course "for 1M users you'd pay 8-30 millions dollars" looks worse than "for 1k users you'd pay 'only' 8-30 thousands dollars", right?
Couple the above with how much they're rushing it, on purpose, to not give the developers time to adapt to the API price changes. One month of dev time is almost nothing.
Infinity was my favorite. it had a lot of flexibility & updates. RIP