Apollo will close down on June 30th • Hacker News Board

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#121

Post by SkyPuncher » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 6:06 PM UTC

robbiet480 wrote: post #14

I just don’t see Reddit’s response here other than “yes, turns out we are the bad guys who have been continually lying and manipulating the situation for our benefit”. I wonder if they’ll see employees quit over this. How do you trust your employer after this? I bet some subreddits will go permanently private or delete themselves over this. Just absolutely stunning turn of events, massive kudos to Christian for recor…

> Christian says in the post the refunds will cost him personally about $250,000. Does he have a claim against Reddit for that money I wonder?

Why would they?

In fact, lots of people were already frustrated with the handling of "lifetime access" while having ads being pushed.

A business, Apollo, made an offer (lifetime access) to gain marketshare. It worked as Apollo is the defacto Reddit App for iOS. Now they cannot hold true to their offer, so they're forced to refund it. This is the price of the bargain Apollo made.

I feel terrible for Christian on an individual level. He must be going through hell. However, there is a business being run by Apollo and it needs to be held to it's commitments.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#122

Post by CharlesW » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 6:06 PM UTC

The end of Apollo is the end of Reddit for me. As with Twitter, I'll be taking my toys with me when I leave the sandbox.

What are good tools for erasing one's Reddit history? I just learned about redact.dev (but haven't tried it yet) for example.

UPDATE: react.dev seems to work well. It's deleted 1.5K+ posts as I type this at 0.65–0.85 per second.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#123

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 6:06 PM UTC

willidiots wrote: post #96

I hope Apollo's not overplaying their hand here, though it's super interesting hearing these conversations from the inside. It's clear reddit's got it out for the 3p apps, and I'm personally leaving reddit over this (longtime RIF user), but this post is a bit concerning. It focuses on the "[apollo can] quiet down [for $10M]" topic in the conversation, and the apparent misunderstanding between Apollo and Reddit, Reddi…

[deleted]

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#124

Post by kanbara » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 6:07 PM UTC

bagels wrote: post #70

I don't have any dogs in this race, but Apollo should be careful about recording calls. Just because he is in a one-party location doesn't mean he hasn't violated the law wherever the other party is if they are in a two-party location and he didn't have consent from the other party.

man ain’t gonna get extradited to the us over recording consent.

this makes no sense, these are STATE laws. if he is subject to jurisdiction of canada, then legally he is fine. that’s like florida saying they will go to CA and arrest people who have trans kids. they have no legal standing

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#125

Post by com2kid » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 6:07 PM UTC

robbiet480 wrote: post #14

I just don’t see Reddit’s response here other than “yes, turns out we are the bad guys who have been continually lying and manipulating the situation for our benefit”. I wonder if they’ll see employees quit over this. How do you trust your employer after this? I bet some subreddits will go permanently private or delete themselves over this. Just absolutely stunning turn of events, massive kudos to Christian for recor…

Reddit should try honestly.

"We are losing lots of money, we need to start making money, reddit gold isn't bringing in enough revenue to pay the bills. 3rd party apps don't show ads, which costs us a lot of money every month. Keeping the 3rd party APIs up and running also costs us money. Because Reddit needs to stop losing money, we are closing down 3rd party apps."

I don't know what why it is so hard to say that...

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#126

Post by dustyharddrive » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 6:07 PM UTC

d1str0 wrote: post #104

Scarblac wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had never heard of it before this. Could he just make a backend for it and take his users with him?

Might be a pretty big legal argument if he just copied Reddit backend functionality. Would probably have to redesign the front end from the ground up as well to make it clear it’s not just a rip off.

I don’t think cloning products is illegal, and can’t find any patents held by Reddit.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#127

Post by Invictus0 » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 6:07 PM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #101

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #74

I'm not a user of Apollo, and honestly have been perfectly fine using old.reddit.com on both mobile and desktop. That said, while I realize it's just his side of the story, the Apollo developer comes across as imminently reasonable and rational (and he apparently has the receipts to back it up), while Reddit comes across as embodying typical corporate greed. On a related note, I think everyone should understand that,…

> "Don't be evil" is simply impossible for large corporations I see Patagonia as the antithesis of this broadly accepted assertion. It's possible, it just takes having a goal for your company that's more than greed.

Patagonia didn't take VC money, and reddit wouldn't have even survived this long if they hadn't

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#128

Post by rednalexa » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 6:07 PM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #101

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #74

I'm not a user of Apollo, and honestly have been perfectly fine using old.reddit.com on both mobile and desktop. That said, while I realize it's just his side of the story, the Apollo developer comes across as imminently reasonable and rational (and he apparently has the receipts to back it up), while Reddit comes across as embodying typical corporate greed. On a related note, I think everyone should understand that,…

> "Don't be evil" is simply impossible for large corporations I see Patagonia as the antithesis of this broadly accepted assertion. It's possible, it just takes having a goal for your company that's more than greed.

Isn’t Patagonia privately owned though?

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#129

Post by iscrewyou » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 6:08 PM UTC

19h wrote: post #45

Can’t Apollo be open-sourced and the tokens of the original app be used? I’d absolutely donate on a monthly basis.

He’d open sourced his Achoo app in the past. All it led to was copycats pretending they are not copycats. No attribution and the whole nine yards. If you google it, there still might be remnants of the incident. So I wouldn’t hold out hope on Apollo, rightfully so.

Re: Apollo will close down on June 30th

#130

Post by Aachen » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 6:08 PM UTC

19h wrote: post #45

Can’t Apollo be open-sourced and the tokens of the original app be used? I’d absolutely donate on a monthly basis.

Or adapted for another platform. Open source UI means you need basically the database adapter to set up a clone. Betcha a lot of current Apollo users would swing onto that new platform.