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Comment by justusthane | Hacker News Reader

Apollo is such an incredibly high quality app — in fact, it’s so good that I haven’t had it installed on my phone in a couple of years because when I have it I spend way too much time on Reddit.

The features, the polish, the customizability — everything about it is really top notch.

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I always enthusiastically recommended it to my friends telling them it felt more like a native first-party Apple app than any actual native first-party Apple app.

I agree. I'm not a mobile dev but I am a software dev and I'm continually impressed by how good an app Apollo is. It's one of the apps I use that seem like they should be the standard for quality.

Totally agree. In fact, it was so good it allowed me to enjoy Reddit far more than I could have without it. And spend far more time on Reddit than I would have. Killing Apollo kills my desire to use Reddit.

That’s one advantage of the janky mobile site and the official app — I spend way less time on Reddit!

I use both Apollo for iOS and Sync on Android and I would give the edge to Sync for polish, aesthetics and customizability.

.........aaaaaaand Reddit Sync "will shut down on June 30, 2023"

RIP

https://www.reddit.com/r/redditsync/comments/144jp3w/sync_wi...

I had never heard of it before this. Could he just make a backend for it and take his users with him?

Might be a pretty big legal argument if he just copied Reddit backend functionality. Would probably have to redesign the front end from the ground up as well to make it clear it’s not just a rip off.

I don’t think cloning products is illegal, and can’t find any patents held by Reddit.

No need for a front end, he’s got the app, that’s the whole point

I don't remember the specific case at the moment, but a few years back I think Oracle was suing Google (or some mix of big companies) about Google replicating the Java api but with a complete from-scratch backend reimplementation. Google wasn't using private Oracle source code, just building a replacement that used the publicly published api. Google won the case, and it I remember right that established public api's as non copyright or something. Again, not a lawyer and someone else probably has the details better than I do.

But reddit is so much more than an API… and I can’t imagine anyone wants to deal with the user-generated-content hell of actually hosting that kind of platform.

Google could afford it. They're still in sore need of a good social network.

He addressed it in the post, he's not really interested in that kind of work.

Technically possible, but not really feasible due to the way Reddit is set up and people who signed up for the app agreed to. It would be a gigantic mess, and I reckon he's not interested in creating a new social platform/link aggregate which is why he would rather refund the ~$250k.

You should read the post, he addresses this in it.

This never struck me as a realistic option. The Apollo user base is orders of magnitude less than Reddit, and, even though Apollo is an incredible iOS app, the primary benefit of a large social network like Reddit is the social network.

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