By far the best Reddit experience I've used
Apollo: An iOS Reddit app built for power and speed
31–40 of 137 posts
Re: Apollo: An iOS Reddit app built for power and speed
#32Hey, I made this! Cool to be on HN. :D Thanks for all the kind words.
Re: Apollo: An iOS Reddit app built for power and speed
#33In 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…
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.
Re: Apollo: An iOS Reddit app built for power and speed
#34This 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 cha…
Reddit hasn’t opened the chat API so third-party apps can’t use it.
Ah, that is unfortunate (and hopefully not how all new reddit features will be handled.) I’m glad to know it isn’t the developer’s fault.
Re: Apollo: An iOS Reddit app built for power and speed
#35In 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…
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.
Re: Apollo: An iOS Reddit app built for power and speed
#36Apollo 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. htt…
I’m still using Alien Blue. The reader mode for external websites and the multireddit categories is what I’m missing most in other Reddit apps
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...)
Re: Apollo: An iOS Reddit app built for power and speed
#37In 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…
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
/r/SpaceX is still spectacular, and there doesn't seem much reason to migrate away.
Re: Apollo: An iOS Reddit app built for power and speed
#38I’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.
If you copy a reddit link to the clipboard and then open Apollo it will ask if you want to open the link. It doesn't work everytime but good enough.
Re: Apollo: An iOS Reddit app built for power and speed
#39This 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 cha…
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.
Re: Apollo: An iOS Reddit app built for power and speed
#40In 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…
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.