There's a little widget on my home screen that's been counting down for two weeks now. It just says a number and "Apollo shuts down." I put it there half as a joke and half because I genuinely didn't believe I'd need reminding. Turns out I did, because I still open Apollo every morning with my coffee out of pure muscle memory, and every morning it's a little gut punch.
If you missed it: Christian Selig, the one guy who built Apollo (my Reddit app of choice since maybe 2019), announced back on June 8th that he's shutting it down on June 30th. Reddit rolled out new API pricing that makes running a third-party app like his financially impossible, not "tighten your belt" expensive, just flatly not viable for a one-person operation. He didn't sound bitter about it in his post, which honestly made it worse to read.
I want to be careful not to just re-run the whole saga here because if you've been anywhere near tech Twitter (or Reddit itself, while it's still letting you scroll) you've had this shoved in your face for two weeks straight. Thousands of subreddits went dark on the 12th in protest. Some came back after 48 hours like they'd agreed to. A bunch didn't. One of the ones I actually check daily, a small vintage computing sub I won't bother naming because it's tiny, is still sitting there private as of this morning, mods silent. A handful of the bigger subreddits took the jokier route and just started posting nothing but photos of John Oliver, which is a genuinely funny way to protest a corporate decision and I respect the commitment.
What I actually want to complain about is smaller and more selfish than API pricing tiers. I paid for Apollo. Not a subscription I forgot to cancel, an actual deliberate purchase, because the app was just better than the free one Reddit makes. No autoplaying video ads shoved between comments. No weird recommended-posts tray eating half the screen. It looked and felt like somebody who used Reddit every day had built it for people who use Reddit every day, which apparently was never going to be a sustainable business once the platform decided third-party clients were competition instead of free marketing. The official Reddit app, which I've now got redownloaded and sitting on my phone like a consolation prize, feels like using a website that's still finding its feet, except it's been out for years.
The CEO did an AMA on the 16th to talk about all this and it went about as well as you'd expect, which is to say mods are reporting they're getting pulled from their own communities for staying private, and nobody in charge seems to be budging an inch on the pricing itself. I don't think this ends with Reddit reversing course, if I'm being honest. I think it ends with a lot of good apps disappearing and a lot of us grumbling our way back to the official one because the alternative is not using Reddit at all, and apparently I'm not willing to go that far.
Small silver lining, and this is the tangent I said I wasn't going to have but here we are: I've barely opened Reddit at all this past week because I've been completely absorbed in Diablo IV instead, which came out on the 6th and has eaten every free hour I've had since. There's something almost funny about losing my favorite way to procrastinate right as I found a much more efficient way to procrastinate. My Necromancer is level 47 and I have strong, specific opinions about the itemization in World Tier 3 that nobody asked for.
Anyway. Nine days left on that widget. I already know I'm going to keep it on my home screen after the app stops working, just to see the number go negative for a while, which is a strange thing to admit but there it is.