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Comment by Irishsteve | Hacker News Reader

The owner of this client should just try to replace underlying Reddit with something else. Someone tried something similar years ago they bought up all the popular twitter clients

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What? There are many people who pay to use Christian's app specifically to interact with Reddit. If Apollo suddenly switched to another social network, it would make a lot of people understandably angry

Sure, but what’s the alternative? Shutting it down? Like that won’t make people angry too…

This is the nature/danger of being 100% dependent on a free API. You're at the mercy of the API vendor, and there may be no alternative.

In Christian's case, if Reddit doesn't change their mind, his best bet is probably to eliminate the free tier, and increase the paid tier pricing. It's worth a shot, but Apollo would probably take such a hit it may no longer be viable as a business.

Tweetbot has been killed by a similar API shakedown, switched to Mastodon, and the app has been very well received.

Well, Tapbots launched Ivory, a totally different app based loosely on Tweetbot, but it required a substantial investment to design and engineer. It's not like Tweetbot just started loading Mastodon one day. In fact, paying Tweetbot customers were left with a nonfunctional app, and many got prorated refunds from Apple.

Ivory has been well-received, but who knows what the numbers are compared to Tweetbot. So this was not a "just swap the API" slam dunk.

Seems like he is in an impossible position to continue down his current path. He has a large enough user base he might only need to replicate a few key subreddits. Sure didn’t reddit start off by having bots vote or post submissions

The suggestion I saw that I like is just to allow bringing your own API key. That way I can pay for my (and ONLY my) usage at whatever level I'm comfortable with.

Unfortunately the number of people who would pay for both an Apollo subscription AND their own Reddit use AND would be willing to obtain and enter an API key is effectively zero.

I don't get this suggestion. Users of this app (myself included) want a different UI for Reddit. Changing the underlying store to something else would make it useless to me because I'm specifically using it to access Reddit. "Something else" wouldn't have the same communities and content that I want to view.

The suggestion seems to be to turn the client into a generic interface for any reddit-like site, and port people to that. Imagine if a few million people swung over to a new site like the exodus from freenode.

Reddit's content isn't special. It's all network effects.

"Reddit's content isn't special. It's all network effects. "

Yes, but they are strong and in place.

Reddit has a LOT of content and users.

It is a good idea in theory, but the timeline is tricky. It isn't realistic to get something up and running before Reddit cuts them off, and by the time they could the users would have moved on.

The reason why everyone is upset is because Apollo works perfectly for the Reddit use case while the official client does not. Sure it is technically superior, but it is "better" from a product management perspective.

Reddit, Tumblr, TikTok, Instagram, etc, all attract a similar type of user but they are different products that engage people in different types of social interactions.

You can't port that.

Are you talking about UberMedia? I used to work there!

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