Apollo is an app that exists to give a great user experience for reddit.

The official app exists to ensure you get advertising and allow reddit to extract as much personal data from you as possible

Didn’t you hear? Christian is a lying, scheming, impossible to work with, dev who they just couldn’t possibly work out a deal with.

I think it’s a move to monetize but without any mindful strategy whatever to utilize the strength of the platform or to maintain the integrity thereof. In other words “Elon did it so we do it too” .

they already bought alien blue and ruined it.

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Reddit tried that before, they bought Alien Blue, and instead of improving it, they turned it into the monstrosity that we now know as the Official Reddit App.

Sometimes, when companies get too big, the C-level executives lose visibility about what the needs of the actual users are and instead, they focus their planning on increasing revenue, no matter what, Quarter after Quarter.

Buying another 3rd party app when they can keep using their shitty app to collect and sell user data to advertisers and marketers without spending more, makes sense to them in their twisted world, sadly.

Something that really blew me away is apparently Reddit has 2000 employees.

What the heck are they doing??

because it’s not the user experience that matters to Spez.

I would imagine that they would consider purchasing an existing client if they hadn’t already gone out and developed their own.

Maybe they first have to make it worthless before trying to buy it.

I can’t speak for Apollo users, but as a user of Infinity and Slide, one of the best features was no ads

They don’t want to maintain two apps, and the quality of the app isn’t a priority to them. They just want to remove competition so that they have full control.

They bought alien blue awhile ago and butchered it. New Reddit is horrible. Even on old reddit the sidebar is in the way (an extension can hide it). They’re just not good at this. (And maintaining two apps is more cost than one.)

They would have screwed it up anyway.

It is not super clear whether Christian would have sold Apollo to Reddit. I know he mentioned them buying it from him for $10 million, but he has also said that he wouldn’t sell Apollo to someone who was just going to mess it up because he cares about it. Reddit would have definitely made it a shell of what it currently is.

He was pretty much asked this question in a recent interview.

NP: If they’d offered to buy the app from you, would you have sold it to them?

I guess it depends on the stage. I mean, I’m just some guy, so if the number was high enough, sure. Absolutely. At the stage where it was clear that they weren’t interested in having third-party apps around anymore, just because of the pricing and some of the API changes around explicit content or whatnot, if that was the point where they said like, “That being said, we would like to maybe work with your user base or take your user base and figure out a way to make them happy in the context of the official app and work with you and your app through an acquisition,” I honestly would have listened to that.

Prior to that, it would have had to have been a pretty good number, just because I love building Apollo and being so in touch with so many people through the community. It would have to be a big number, losing such a big part of your life and what you do every day. There’s an emotional penalty to losing that is hard to quantify with money, as superficial as that sounds.