Apollo, the best Reddit client for iPhone, will stop working this month

Bad news for fans Reddit: Apollothe best client for iPhone, iPad and Mac with Apple Silicon, it will stop working this month. This was announced by its creator, Christian Selig, stating that it is impossible to imagine the costs that the implementation of the new Reddit payment API will require.

As Selig explained, Apollo will cease operations on June 30. This way, the app will disable API access and will not generate charges as per the new policy implemented by Reddit. In an extensive post, the developer himself has made it clear that the decision is solely based on recent measures announced by the platform.

“Unfortunately, recent decisions and actions by Reddit have made it impossible for Apollo to continue operating. Thank you so much for all the support over the years,” wrote the creator of the application. In his text, Christian Selig explained that as part of the new payment API keeping Apollo running would cost millions of dollars a year that he couldn’t afford..

Recall that on April 18, Reddit announced the aforementioned change in the access policy to its API. It will no longer be free for third-party customers, but an important piece of information was left out during the announcement: its price. Anyway, from the company they announced that the value will be realized in a “fair and reality-based” way. Basically, Reddit didn’t want to face the same kind of criticism that Twitter did a few months ago.

However, Selig’s calculations showed that it would be impossible to support Apollo even as one of the most popular and successful Reddit clients in the market. “The reported price was $0.24 per 1,000 API calls. I quickly entered this into my calculator and saw […] What with my current usage would cost nearly $2 million per month or over $20 million per year.“, the public.

Apollo, a popular Reddit client, says goodbye on June 30th.

Christian Selig also pointed out that the Apollo Ultra subscription price increase is impossible to deal with the new Reddit API. And to this is added short notification time between the price to be realized and its effective date.

“Even more than the huge price tag associated with the API, the 30-day period between pricing and billing developers is a much, much, much more serious problem, and I can’t solve it. much more time to review the payment model in my app, migrate users from existing plans, test changes, and convince users to upgrade to the new version.”

The creator of Apollo also explained that he had several posts about it on Reddit, and that not all of them were friendly. He also assured that he asked for more time to deal with the situation, but the answer was no. Thus, the only way out was that the client stopped working on the specified date.

Selig assures that he does not intend to work on projects of competitors – despite the fact that he has already received offers – and that he is not going to sell his application. “May be [la vendería] if there was a perfect buyer who thought he could turn the Apollo into something cool and sustainable. But I’d rather see the app just die if it goes to a company that will turn what I’ve worked so hard on into something that will destroy its legacy,” he said. iPhone, iPad or Mac with M1 or M2 chip, start thinking about finding a replacement.

Aside from the Apollo shutdown controversy, Reddit has already retired its payment API. Yesterday, edge said the platform will retain its free API for some accessibility-focused applications. Keep in mind that the platform has been heavily criticized in previous days for how its new policy will affect certain tools such as Moon for Redditintended for the blind.