I think Reddit is just embarrassed that one guy can make an app that's so, so, soooo much better than their slow, cluttered, ugly, expensive app.
Reddits is tracking, Ad revenue, prioritizing cached content and who knows what other priorities have been pushed into it.
Also it’s not like Reddit doesn’t have the resources to both improve their apps usability and focus on tracking, ad revenue, etc.
Maybe their devs are jealous of what one guy with freedom to actually create the best thing he can can do, but I really doubt they came up with the idea to charge 100x what imgur charges for similar API calls.
If Reddit adopted Apollo, they would slow it to a messy crawl in 6 months.
I think that app may be the basis of the current Reddit app somewhere deep down inside, but it basically bears no resemblance at this point since Reddit's priority is chasing ad revenue and TikTok style feeds instead of just letting people follow and comment in their communities.
This of course left a gap for a new good iOS client and Apollo was born.
If they bought Apollo I'm sure the same cycle would occur again.
They (Reddit) claim that this is not expected behavior. Some other people have also reported this. No fixes.
Not sure if it’s true but it struck me as making sense. The timing is too coincidental.