But they ran into time limitations. They plan to IPO later this year and they want the 3rd party apps to be dead before then.
If a 1.5 person app (Apollo) is handily beating Reddit's app... what on earth is the holdup? Either the eng team is wildly incompetent, or this is by executive choice.
Reddit's inability to deliver on mod tools despite a decade's worth of promises makes me think it's 40/60 wildly incompetent and needing firing vs exec choice.
I don't think the current app's design is an accident (i.e. it's not pure incompetence). It meets several objectives:
* Minimizes the user-generated content shown on each page (a couple of threads or a couple of comments), so it reduces the amount of traffic to the server and DB as the user browses around.
* Oh, and it leaves a ton of space for ads, which (bonus) can be served from a separate ad server, further lightening their load.
* Plus, there are Bob Ross-like "happy accidents" like pages jumping back to the top when you go a level up from a thread - going back to your spot can trigger more ads to be shown.
The 3rd-party apps subvert all this, and bypass the ads, to boot.
Fine, I'll spell it out: The hard part of making a client is making a client that can retain the money-making portion of an application. It is trivial to charge a small amount for client functionality when the predominant cost is on someone else. The reason you need a lot of engineers building the Reddit client is that they have to deliver the ads, make sure the ads are viewed, and correctly reported as having been viewed. The whole thing.
If you don't have to worry about making money, you can make a front-end to anything quite easily. This is why most HN commenters frequently make the "what's so hard about the Uber app" mistake. The hard part isn't the app chrome. The hard part is making it make money.
Apollo is a better client. The comparison is Apollo vs the Reddit app, not Apollo vs Reddit as a whole.
We are talking about clients here.
EDIT: Oops, that’s per day! Your math is right, please ignore.
Another example: Over a year ago, I decided to explore programming with Python. At work, we encountered the problem of our web-based software requiring users to download PDFs to read them. As a personal project, I set out to build a Python application that would generate individual image files for each page of the PDFs, providing both a preview image and a higher resolution version. I dedicated a few evenings and two Saturdays to the project, and after approximately two weeks, it was successfully completed. Additionally, I created a simple GUI using Vue.js, enabling file uploads and displaying the resulting images. An experienced Python developer could likely achieve the same task in just one or two hours, with an additional two hours for the frontend.
Months later, the company decided to embark on a similar project but with additional extended OCR (Optical Character Recognition), incorporating machine learning to extract structured data from the PDFs. Initially, the prototype aimed solely at uploading the PDFs, with the machine learning aspects simulated. Months were spent discussing, conceptualizing, refining, and revising before the implementation phase commenced. Over a year later (though I have since left the company, I remain in contact with current employees), the first prototype was completed. Users can upload PDFs, and the system generates images from individual pages. The frontend simulates a progress bar, as the microservices run in the background without a built-in monitoring system. One of the more experienced developers foresaw this issue from the start, but management hindered his efforts until he eventually resigned. To date, the machine learning component remains unimplemented.
My last example for now: I recall a situation where the best developer I know was hired by a large corporation as external support. Within a few weeks, he was assigned an easy standard task that any competent developer could handle with ease. Believing it to be a sample project for the standard onboarding process, he promptly and efficiently completed it in less than a week. When he delivered the finished result, his clients were astonished. They had planned this to be his sole project for the next six months and had expected it to take a significant amount of time.
In summary, it is not uncommon for companies to invest months of work and millions of dollars into projects that a reasonably skilled developer could accomplish in a day. Never underestimate the incompetence of some organizations.
Imgur serves advertisements when you go to their page. But you don't get them through the API.
https://api.imgur.com/#commercial
> Your application is commercial if you're making any money with it (which includes in-app advertising), if you plan on making any money with it, or if it belongs to a commercial organization.
Calling an API and monetizing the front end it is fine. The money that Imgur loses from ads is made up in the API call monetization.
The Reddit APIs don't prohibit serving advertisements or any other form of monetization of the use of the APIs and mention it as something that your app would need to do.
https://www.redditinc.com/policies/data-api-terms
You will disclose in your App through a privacy policy how you collect, use, store, and disclose data collected from your App Users and other visitors, including, where applicable, that third parties (e.g., advertisers) may serve content or advertisements and collect information directly from your App Users and other visitors that may include the use of cookies. In addition, by using the Data APIs, Reddit may use submitted information in accordance with our Privacy Policy.
It was about maximizing the value of the IPO by ensuring investors would be minimally aware of the failures of the app and new Reddit, by ensuring as few 3rd party products exist as comparatives to the first party offerings.
It could be argued to be part of a conspiracy to defraud investors by ensuring they were incapable of being fully informed....