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Apollo: An iOS Reddit app built for power and speed

apolloapp.io

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Re: Apollo: An iOS Reddit app built for power and speed

#81

Post by samatman »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #73
procinct wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shows it’s own ads, not Reddit’s. you can pay a one-time fee to remove them as well.

I've always thought that kind of business model was a bit questionable. You build a client and show ads on top of someone else's content? We consider it pretty ridiculous if a browser were to inject its own ads. Yet if you build a client that pulls free content from https://librivox.org/ or podcast RSS and serve it from their servers, nobody bats an eye if you inject ads into it. Though I'm pretty sure I haven't noti…

We consider it pretty ridiculous if a browser were to inject its own ads.

Ridiculous or not, Brave does exactly this.

I don't care, personally. If Reddit wants my eyeballs, they should stop with the user-hostile behavior that's driven me away from the site. As long as they serve an API, I'm in luck, because someone who cares about their users can build a better interface on top.

If they stop doing this, well, no big loss; I have enough ways to waste time.

Re: Apollo: An iOS Reddit app built for power and speed

#82

Post by criddell »

iamthatis wrote: post #35
blackbrokkoli wrote: post #12

In 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 po…

> posts have always been paramount and what attract people to the site, even though the discussions are great too

FWIW, the comments are the main reason I go to any social media site (Reddit and HN included).

Re: Apollo: An iOS Reddit app built for power and speed

#83

Post by hug »

zackify wrote: post #77
iamthatis wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 po…

I love apollo! Only 1 problem and it constantly annoys me. Surprised nobody else has mentioned it: Why does the comment and post body hide when you single tap? I am scrolling through a long post and my slow scroll registers as a tap. Now it’s hidden. Tap again and I lose my spot.

I use this feature all the time. I collapse comment chains I'm completely uninterested in by tapping on them.

That said, you can turn it off for comments:

Settings > General > Tap to Collapse

Re: Apollo: An iOS Reddit app built for power and speed

#84

Post by hug »

fragmede wrote: post #80
1123581321 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 harde…

Apollo's collapsing comment UI could be better - there's a shortcut to go to the next root comment, but I don't want to go to the next root comment, I want to go to collapse the current thread and see the next parent or grand-parent comment. I'm guessing it's because I'm on an older iPhone 7, but Apollo's makes it very hard to write comments. In particular it loses my place when switching from Apollo, to another app…

This specific behaviour is why I love Apollo. I do this exact thing when skimming through threads -- there's a couple of ways to do what you want to do:

Tap on the top of a comment to collapse that comment and any below it, assuming you haven't turned off "tap to collapse" in settings > general > comments.

Set a gesture for one of the swipe directions to collapse the current thread (I believe this exists, by default, as right-short-swipe) in settings > gestures.

Re: Apollo: An iOS Reddit app built for power and speed

#85

Post by jml78 »

iamthatis wrote: post #35
blackbrokkoli wrote: post #12

In 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 po…

How about creating a similar iOS app for this site? :-)

Re: Apollo: An iOS Reddit app built for power and speed

#86

Post by ajkjk »

iamthatis wrote: post #35
blackbrokkoli wrote: post #12

In 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 po…

I'm another person for whom I only care about the comments. The only point of scanning posts for me is to find good comments about stuff.

Re: Apollo: An iOS Reddit app built for power and speed

#87

Post by hug »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #73
procinct wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shows it’s own ads, not Reddit’s. you can pay a one-time fee to remove them as well.

I've always thought that kind of business model was a bit questionable. You build a client and show ads on top of someone else's content? We consider it pretty ridiculous if a browser were to inject its own ads. Yet if you build a client that pulls free content from https://librivox.org/ or podcast RSS and serve it from their servers, nobody bats an eye if you inject ads into it. Though I'm pretty sure I haven't noti…

Morally, I don't see this as in any way worse than reddit, which is doing the exact same thing, albeit hosting the platform on which people are sharing their content in the first place.

Re: Apollo: An iOS Reddit app built for power and speed

#88

Post by tyre »

iamthatis wrote: post #35
blackbrokkoli wrote: post #12

In 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 po…

I think an interesting UX would be to put voting in the post. So you have to go to the comments to upvote/downvote.

That kind of delay encourages discussion and probably helps with the psychological negatives of infinite scroll

Re: Apollo: An iOS Reddit app built for power and speed

#89

Post by jaflo »

markholmes wrote: post #71
iamthatis wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 int…

Is there or could there be a way to disable the Home and All buttons? I find Reddit to be much less of a time suck if I’m going to specific subreddits and reading interesting content, but I often just mindlessly browse All without thinking. I had to remove Apollo from my phone (even though I paid for it!) because I often find myself spending too much time doing nothing. My current solution is bookmarking a bunch of i…

I think it would be interesting to disable the infinite scroll and either having a button to load the next page or disable loading the next page entirely.

Re: Apollo: An iOS Reddit app built for power and speed

#90

Post by asdff »

bravura wrote: post #55
ftio wrote: post #42

Not only is Apollo the best Reddit app for iOS, it might be one of the best 3rd-party iOS apps out there, period. It’s incredibly well-designed, very fast, and it’s updated very consistently. Christian, the developer, is a former Apple guy, and it shows — the level of attention and care he puts in is unparalleled. I’d love a hand-curated (by someone with good taste) list of apps of this quality. Anyone know of one?

Bear app for notes, and also see recommendations on thesweetsetup.com... my only grip with bear is it’s iOS only, no web access even. I didn’t care until my iOS and mac both died during travel and i couldn’t use bear from droid or linux

If you want true cross platform, theres always a cloud service + plain text files.
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