I've had Apollo on my phone since sometime in 2019, and it's genuinely weird to sit here typing out that in six days it just... stops existing. June 30th. Christian Selig (the guy who built it, basically solo) posted the shutdown date a couple weeks back once he ran the numbers on Reddit's new API pricing, and landed somewhere around $20 million a year to keep the app running as-is. Nobody's paying that out of pocket for a Reddit client, obviously, so that's that.
I want to talk about the blackout for a second because I think most of the coverage got the wrong part of the story. The 48-hour thing on June 12th was never going to be the interesting bit, everyone kind of knew subreddits would go dark for a weekend and then most of them would quietly reopen, which is roughly what happened. r/gaming's still doing the "everything is Rickroll images" bit as I write this, which, fine, I respect the commitment even if it's mostly theater at this point.
The part that actually got under my skin happened this week, not two weeks ago. Reddit started pulling moderator permissions on subreddits that stayed dark and reopening them without the mod teams' say-so. r/pics is the one everybody's talking about, mods kept it private in protest, Reddit removed them and handed control to whoever was left, and the sub came back online whether the people who'd built it wanted that or not. Steve Huffman had already gone on record basically shrugging the whole protest off, something to the effect of "this too shall pass," and I guess this is what "passing" looks like when you're the landlord. Because that's the framing Reddit itself has used before, weirdly, mods as tenants, not owners, of the communities they spent years growing for free.
That's the part that bugs me more than losing an app icon off my home screen. Apollo dying is annoying and I'll miss it (the swipe gestures, the way it handled crossposts, no ads shoved between every third post). But it's a piece of software. What happened to r/pics is a company demonstrating, in public, that the "community" pitch was always conditional on the community doing what the company wanted. I don't think that's a hot take, I think it's just what happened, in the same week, documented, with screenshots everywhere.
Small tangent because I can't help myself: I still don't understand why the official Reddit app is as bad as it is in 2023. It's not new software. It's had years. And it still autoplays video with sound weirdly, still buries the comment sorting option somewhere I have to hunt for every single time, still feels like it's fighting me to show me an ad disguised as a post. Third-party apps existed for years specifically because the official one never got good, and now the plan seems to be to kill the alternatives and hope nobody notices the gap. I notice the gap. I notice it every morning with my coffee, honestly, which is when I do most of my Reddit browsing.
So here's where I've landed, practically. I moved my saved posts list over to a text file last week, which felt a little absurd to be doing in 2023 but here we are. I'm going to try old.reddit.com in a browser tab for a while once Apollo's gone, mostly out of spite for the redesigned site, and see how long I last before I cave and install the official app like everyone else. My guess is about eleven days. I'll probably be wrong.
Selig's been pretty gracious about the whole thing publicly, all things considered, no scorched earth, just a clear-eyed post laying out the math and a note that he's proud of what Apollo became. I respect that a lot more than I'd respect a bitter farewell post, even though I think he'd have earned one. There's an Apollo-branded shirt going up for preorder as a sort of send-off, which I'll probably buy even though I don't really wear graphic tees, because it feels like the right kind of small, dumb tribute to six-ish months of habit forming around a tool that's about to just not be there.
Six days. I already know I'm going to open the app out of muscle memory on July 1st and get the dead screen, or worse, nothing at all where the icon used to be.