Apollo: An iOS Reddit app built for power and speed
apolloapp.io
apolloapp.io
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 with no depth
At the same time, the mechanisms why I use(d) reddit over all the other escapism-in-a-bottle platforms are all discouraged:
* Reading comments, engaging in discussion. You don't even have to open the comment section anymore, so why would you? And if, you will only ever read one or two top comments, inviting the same lowest common denominator battle as with posts themselves.
* Building community, in-depth analysis, being exposed to alternating view points. Well, no place for that in the framework of rapid swiping and shouting in the void.
Good job on the Apollo team to at least include what they call "compact mode" (showcased about a second in the promo video), but the problem with these effects is that they are negatively affecting quality overall, whether or not you as a individual choose to sidestep them.
I hope a new community aggregator like the old reddit will arise soon...
Everything that has millions of random people joined to it has become a cesspool of lowest common denominator clickbait posts and photos.
https://www.reddit.com/r/swift/ https://www.reddit.com/r/iOSProgramming/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/
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.
Have you been chipping away at this since 2014 or did something change in your motivation recently where you decided to complete it?
What would your reaction be to someone suggesting a rewrite in Electron so you could achieve crossplatform support?
These might seem like minor things, and they probably are for most people, but as an heavy iOS user I have a very good sense for how system components look and function, and it drives me up a wall when people reimplement them but break or fail to support some of their behaviors (specifically: if your custom component is supposed to look like a system control, it better act exactly like one!). As an iOS engineer I also know that these parts of UIKit are the somewhat problematic to deal with, but I appreciate apps that take the time to get it right and I would have hoped that an app that prides itself on looking at home on iOS would have put in the effort to care about this as I do. Hope this helps.
Electron wouldn't be a great idea since it doesn't work on iOS. React Native would be something to consider, but I've never been super impressed by any of the results (and it comes with a bunch of issues in and of itself, and to my knowledge isn't compatible with macOS like UIKit is now) so I'd change nothing in that regard.
Out of curiosity, when did you work at Apple? Your website says "built by a former Apple employee", but it seems you've been full-time on this app for most of your post-college years.
Great app though, I use it :)
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/cfnfu8/my_names_chris...
If you considered this small addition that would be fantastic!
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.
That said, you can turn it off for comments:
Settings > General > Tap to Collapse
FWIW, the comments are the main reason I go to any social media site (Reddit and HN included).
That kind of delay encourages discussion and probably helps with the psychological negatives of infinite scroll
That said, I keep wondering when the iPad design mentioned what seems like ‘years’ ago is coming.
I keep hoping for something like Hack for HN that takes what’s currently a waste of screen width when using Apollo in landscape on iPad Pro (posts take 1/2 screen width, with 1/4 screen width margins on each side, putting the posts just out of reach of your thumbs when holding sides of ipad), and instead puts that list of posts on the left 1/4, and shows comments for a selected post on the right 3/4.
// Separately, for image post subreddits, like /r/EarthPorn/, really should have a mode to simply view photos scaled to full screen and swipe left/right to prior/next photo post, with a tap to see the post title and vote UI as an overlay, push up to go into photo + comments mode.
Holy shit, well, that is impressive!
For the record, I am not trying to hate or anything, scrolling through this thread I think there is some kind of cultural disconnect going on. I personally don't care for the infinite content scrolling of today's content aggregator, so I am sad this trend is reflected in more and more places.
I did a poor job of stating this as personal taste and not as assumed facts. Obviously, you (and a lot of others) use and always did use Reddit in a different way than me. There is of course nothing inherently wrong with serving these needs, especially when done in a much superior way like Apollo does.
If you read this reply, I would just like to urge you to keep the negative effects of excessive escapism, polarization, misinformation and group think in mind when designing features. Cheers!
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.
Apollo should be the official app.
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 to check something, then switching back. A message pops up about having saved the text, but frustratingly, it doesn't re-open the editor, so I have to go find the comment I was replying to and opening the compose reply there.
As to whether or not it's Apollo's "place" to make it easier/harder to scan, that makes no sense. Apollo's already an alternative UI, so it's already interjecting an opinion on the 'right' way to experience Reddit. That you might disagree with, eg making photo subs harder to scan, is a difference of opinion, but Apollo is already in that "place".
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.
- In AB dark mode there is no white flash! The screen stays black while the page is loading. In Apollo the screen goes white until the page is finished loading.
- In AB the reader mode forces all sites into reader / minimal HTML mode whether or not the website wants to allow reader mode
- In AB the reader mode seems to get more images and other content which is left out of reader mode by websites. It also seems to be less confused by some websites that display something other than the main content when reader mode is selected.
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?
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 chat with you instead of messaging you now.
It also doesn’t support having multiple “tabs” open at once, although you can sort of hack it by using the main tab and the search tab. Hoping multiple tabs come to the eventual iPad-optimized release.
But again, great app. Possibly too great for people with limited self-control!
That describes it perfect and is the same “problem” I have.
I’m a huge Apollo fan and I do not have it installed solely for the fact that the UX is near flawless and I find myself scrolling mindlessly for hours. The Reddit mobile website is trash in comparison so I always leave after a few minutes.
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.
Thanks for making an app that I used for far too many hours.
I miss the side-pane view that AlienBlue had for iPad, but everything else is great.
That site has essentially turned into mainstream media with links curated by big companies and special interest groups, with the illusion of community curated content.
It's going to be a shit show this coming election with groups spending tens of millions of dollars on gaming that site
I had so many major gripes with all the other reddit apps for iOS, and I tried all the major ones.
I remember using it and dealing with all the bugs, and seeing all the deadline delays etc, never expecting to see it come to light.
Left for a while, and then it was actually released.
And I LOVE it.
Thank you so much iamthatis :)
Afaik, ios doesn't provide anyway to forcibly disable that behavior system-wide.
That behavior is a deal breaker for me, so I can't have any official apps installed.
That said, one really annoying bug that seems to have shown up since iOS 13, is that on the odd occasion after being on another app and swiping back to Apollo the swipe down to refresh feature just doesn't seem to appear or it freezes when it does appear and forces me to restart the app.
Just curious if anyone else has had this issue?
I resorted to trying the official Reddit app and was pleasantly surprised. I assumed it would be way worse, but it’s actually excellent. If you haven’t tried it in a while, I’d recommend it.
After Apple removed 3D Touch from their new devices, I assumed that some kind of workaround would be introduced into the app, even if it wouldn’t be as convenient as the old method. But despite seeing it mentioned a bunch of times on the Apollo subreddit, the usually very responsive developer has ignored people asking about it, and no workaround has appeared. It’s still probably the best Reddit app out there, but it’s a real shame to see such a useful feature removed and users ignored.
It makes the same poor design choices as the “new reddit” redesign.
For what it’s worth, I still exclusively use the old reddit desktop mode on desktop and mobile. There’s an option towards the bottom of your account settings to make this permanent.
Now, if this app removed duplicates of stories and pics that I had seen, that would be great.
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 noticed ads on Apollo off the top of my head. I thought their biz model was to just paywall pro features.
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.
YouTube for example, prohibits showing any ads on screens that serve YouTube api data, and you will lose api access if they catch you doing that.
Please change the swipe sensitivity for collapsing comments or sending replies or maybe change single tap to collapse. I always trigger replies when I want to collapse.
Edit: found the setting and changed both to collapse (I'm pretty sure it wasn't there before. This app's constantly being polished up)
If Reddit had any sense, they'd throw a pile of money at this guy to get him on-board.
the ui is simple and fast. gestures are intuitive.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/antenna-client-for-reddit/id57...
Basic navigational functionality such as swiping through content from one post to another is not available by default, instead it is behind a paywall.
Look, I totally get if there’s premium functionality such as notifications, better posting functions that you need to charge for it.
But as it exists it has less functionality than the default reddit app in which you can navigate. If you’ve already broken user trust by degrading a basic service I will not trust to pay you for the rest.