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Comment by tgsovlerkhgsel | Hacker News Reader

I think that's intentional. They clearly want to kill those apps because they don't generate ad revenue.

Those apps will now also have to move to a subscription-only model because the APIs will be paid, as the Apollo dev confirmed.

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I'm trying to take the most charitable interpretation possible instead of assuming malice on the part of reddit, but it's difficult to interpret it any other way than they have decided to kill 3rd party clients and not be upfront about their intentions.

It wouldn't be so difficult to swallow if the official mobile app was high quality, but it isn't. There are major UX issues with the official app that haven't been fixed for years. The 3rd party app ecosystem is vibrant because of this. Instead of competing and being the best on merit, they have decided to play their platform-owner veto card which is very disappointing, compounded with their dishonesty about the true intent of these changes.

They're a huge company, they could easily acquire five of the third party apps, add ads and keep the developers on payroll to maintain the apps. Banning apps that don't show ads of course.

A main reason people use those apps is to avoid ads. Also to avoid the reddit company's decisions about how stuff should work.

I use Boost because it's far superior to the Reddit app and to Reddit's website (even old.reddit.com), despite Boost having ads and despite me being able to avoid ads on Reddit due to having an ad blocker.

So at least for me, using a third-party app is well worth it despite seeing ads.

[1] - https://boostforreddit.com/

I have leared to ignore any promoted content i.e. ads in my reddit timeline, mostly because they are irrelevant. The app is regardless slow as hell. The Dawn app in comprasion, is extremely smooth and a pleasure to use. I'd guess the difference is the amount of tracking and analytics the official app is trying to do, I'd guess it is also not a native app.

The last time they did that they managed to wreck it so badly in six weeks that it's userbase imploded.

Reddit's management simply have awful UI instincts.

I hate when I’m hovering my thumb on a comment for a millisecond when scrolling the comments sections and accidentally collapsing a thread I’m reading, how can they not test their app with users to catch these simple usability issues?

Seriously. Makes Me feel like my scroll behavior is weird or something. Or like an idiot because I didn’t know a word and wanted to define it by tapping “Look up.” sigh

Yeah try to look up a word and collapse comment thread every. single. time.

This is what you get without a competent UX team unfortunately

One way to do that is fix their own mobile app so it's not a pile of trash. I wouldn't mind seeing the ads if the app was as good as Apollo.

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