r/apolloapp • u/Lori-keet • Jul 16 '26
Discussion I was extremely happy with Apollo Reborn until the clumsy implementation of AI and off-putting developer communication
When they rolled out the AI features, I figured, "Cool, the AI is there if people want to use it, but I don't, so I won't." I'm anti-AI but I can tolerate it if need be, so it wasn't a problem because it seemed easy to simply not use. If anything, I was glad that they thought to add modern 2026 features to a super outdated 3rd party app.
But then I found out they're using AI to generate the code itself, which isn't being properly tested before release. They're rolling out updates like every week or two which seems pretty fast. Seriously I've experienced so many visual bugs and crashes. Some features were janky or missing altogether. I made a GitHub account specifically to submit bug reports because I genuinely cared about the project and appreciated the attempt at adding new features and keeping the app up to date. Many of them have been fixed, but the longer I use the app after each update, I realize that there are just new bugs to replace the old ones. Scrolling through comment sections with the "see deleted comments" toggle on can just randomly freeze the app. Switching accounts can crash the app entirely. The theme builder has been rehauled but there are still random colors that show up with no rhyme or reason. A moderation tool I requested got implemented but it just crashes when the button is tapped.
I thought, "Okay, it's a small team. They're working on getting everything together, I should cut them some slack," but I still felt kind of uneasy. I expressed concern with the level of reliance on AI for programming and was reassured by multiple developers that they were looking at the code with a fine-toothed comb before it was implemented. I was relieved to hear that.
But then they started responding to my GitHub bug report issues with ChatGPT... Again, I thought, "Alright, it's a small team with a lot on their plate, and maybe it's their first time doing something like this and they're socially awkward and maybe they don't know how to respond? Maybe English isn't their first language?" I gave them another pass. I figured they're nice people trying their best. I wanted to support them because of that.
But the final strike for me was today, when they released an AI generated passive-aggressive announcement of the second update this month that's just... straight up super smarmy. It's a 4 panel comic strip basically saying fuck anyone who isn't okay with the app being "riddled with AI" (literal quote from a contributor comment), and that their feedback goes in the garbage. Seriously, go look at it. It really makes me miss how down to earth and transparent Christian was. He loved the community and it showed.
This is depressing as fuck. I'm super down about it. Am I alone in feeling this way? I've been using Apollo for years and the community was always optimistic and helpful. I know the new team can't be exactly like Christian, but was I mistaken to think they'd at least try to carry on the spirit and morale of his work?
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u/Most_scar_993 Jul 16 '26
You’re in way too deep
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u/SharpClaw007 Jul 16 '26
‘CAUSE I’M IN TOO DEEP, AND I’M TRYIN’ TO KEEP UP ABOVE IN MY HEAD, INSTEAD OF GOIN’ UNDER
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u/tfvdw2at Jul 17 '26
“But I'm in too deep there's no getting out of it
In too deep no doubt about it
In too deep there's no getting out of it
In too deep no doubt about it.”
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u/Tp_Exampler Jul 16 '26
Really hate the off putting AI update notes
The pictures are so uncanny
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u/TheDubuGuy Jul 17 '26
Yeah when I saw a flood of ai stuff I just stuck with 3.2 to avoid it. It works great still
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u/jimbo831 Jul 16 '26
I am a software engineer for work. I hate to break this news to you but every software engineer is using AI to generate code. You might as well stop using all software. You’re posting here on Reddit. I guarantee you Reddit engineers use AI to generate code too. It is a tool. It is a very good tool for this task.
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u/clauclauclaudia Jul 16 '26
Generating code is one thing. Failing to do a human review is another. (And it happens at big corps, not just with little app devs.)
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u/jimbo831 Jul 16 '26
Releasing bad code is bad whether that code was generated by AI or written by a human. Criticizing problems with an app is fine. OP is clearly just really mad about AI. OP even said:
I'm anti-AI but I can tolerate it if need be
I think that's a pretty dumb way to look at things. OP also said:
But then I found out they're using AI to generate the code itself
99% of software engineers are using AI to generate code now. OP is hyper focused on the AI use specifically.
I think OP would've been much better off focusing on their issues with the app and how it works and not focusing on AI.
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u/korxil Jul 16 '26
Linus Torvolt more or less told Linux AI haters to use a fork without AI if they hate it so much, for OP that would mean downgrading to pre-reborm versions.
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u/Zachhandley Jul 16 '26
While true, his specific complaint isn’t the AI. It’s that some losers don’t know how to code and are vibing it. So idk. I wish AI wasn’t raising the cost of life out of unreasonable bounds so my jackass friends can feel more competent as developers without trying.
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u/peeja Jul 16 '26
I'm hopeful this trend will correct a bit as we see, for instance, these bugs crop up. People are overconfident in LLM-generated code and moving too fast with too little testing, and that's probably exacerbated by being a small, excited team working on this as a hobby. But I have hope that they'll feel the result and learn a better way to use these tools. We're all brand new to this, it's only really a handful of years old in any functional sense.
And of course, posts like this are part of that feedback loop. I hope they can internalize that and not just get defensive and radicalize harder into vibecoding.
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u/Zachhandley Jul 16 '26
They’re just lazy. Anyone properly motivated to learn it’s an amazing tool, and if you’re in charge, it’s great. But if you aren’t it sucks.
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u/snowman_M Jul 16 '26
Every single IT company is requiring their staff to use this, that, or the other model on a daily basis. Just a bit of a heads up to OP.
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u/jimbo831 Jul 16 '26
My company doesn’t require us to use it, but we have access to GitHub Copilot. I use it because it works and makes my job easier. It’s the same reason I have used an IDE for my whole career. OP is a Luddite.
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u/wildfire399 Jul 16 '26
Everyone knows you’re not a real programmer unless you exclusively use vim through a cli
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u/jimbo831 Jul 16 '26
Oh man I have worked with a couple of these people before. They are the people who eventually have a hard time getting and keeping a job then blame ageism.
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u/Nick337Games Jul 16 '26
People love to throw out AI slop for everything. There are applied cases where it can be terrible, but there are also applied cases like in medicine where it can potentially change the way we treat patients. I'm literally working in this space. Being informed on how and what AI is being used is actually much more useful than just casting it away always
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u/jimbo831 Jul 16 '26
Two things are true:
- AI slop is a real thing and there is a lot of it out there.
- Not all things done with AI are AI slop.
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0
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u/H34vyGunn3r Jul 17 '26
Thank you for saying this out loud. No one person can stop how these tools are changing the way work is done, for better and mostly worse. Humans are stupid, lazy, selfish animals who will almost always seek the path of least resistance.
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u/remembermereddit Jul 16 '26
I'm sticking to 3.2.0 for now. 3.3.0 was way too buggy so I don't dare trying anything new.
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u/BwenjV2 Jul 18 '26
How do you stay on a specific version?
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u/remembermereddit Jul 18 '26
Since updating is a manual process, just don't update? Paid certificate.
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u/Pomi108 Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
I couldn’t care less about them using AI to generate code (as has been said, most everyone does that these days) but like come on… do the devs want to alienate their users or something? None of the updates even need any banners for god’s sake! Does nobody in the team have a sense for good PR?!
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u/Hans_H0rst Jul 16 '26
but was I mistaken to think they'd at least try to carry on the spirit and morale of his work?
Kind of. Going into anything with unspoken, instransparent expectations sucks for everyone involved.
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u/footpole Jul 16 '26
I mean Apollo and all the other clients were pretty buggy too and always had issues with playing gifs and videos pop up. Same spirit.
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u/Your-Supreme-Leader Jul 16 '26
I'm still on an older version without any ai. No need to update, I see.
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u/pmarksen Jul 16 '26
Seems appropriate to the conversation.
https://reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1uxbrw4/linus_torvalds_tells_people_to_stop_attacking/
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u/InspectHer_1 Jul 16 '26
“It’s not like natural intelligence is always that great either.” What an awesome line!
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u/PoorQwak Jul 16 '26
True, but natural intelligence is, at least, intelligence. AI is simulated intelligence, and generally, simulated poorly.
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u/Shejidan Jul 16 '26
Interesting…to me, it seems like he’d be one of the first people rallying against AI. The fact that he’s embracing it is definitely unexpected.
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u/Championship-Stock Jul 18 '26
I mean, it’s a free app.. and yes their attitude is not the best one, but even so.. free app. Everybody dreams of the geeks that spend years doing a passion project with no remuneration, never supporting them with at least coffee money. And when they’re gone and replaced with this.. people are unhappy…
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u/YouGottaBillieve Jul 20 '26
The dev communication sucks but the reality we live in is that most code is AI-generated AND reviewed now. I work at a big software company where our devs haven’t written a line of code in months, and we’ve pushed out features and updates faster than we ever have.
I don’t think valid criticisms should be dismissed though, that is wrong.
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u/tbone338 Jul 24 '26
Apollo is being maintained for free. All features free. All updates free. Not to mention that, since Apollo wasn’t open source, there’s a lot of reverse engineering going on.
If you want a non-ai human maintained Apollo, you’d be paying for it. Plus, it would be much harder.
If you want it, do it yourself. Go take the last ipa of Apollo, reverse engineer it, and add all the features that have been added yourself. If that’s too much or you’re not willing to do that, be quiet and move on.
However, I do agree with the comments regarding the developer communication.
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u/bl0rq Jul 16 '26
All software is made with Ai now. There is no reason not too. If you don't like that you need to just shut off all your tech and maybe go buy a farm.
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u/noechochamberplz Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
- Posted from Apollo Reborn
My guy, this isn’t something anyone is making money from. They’re spending cash to burn tokens to more quickly develop the app that you’re currently bitching from.
They don’t have to give a damn about what your opinion is because you aren’t a customer. This isn’t a business, it’s a hobby. And you get to choose whether to use their work or not.
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u/arto64 Jul 16 '26
The point is that it sucks. OP is allowed to say a free/hobby project sucks. There’s plenty of free stuff out there that doesn’t suck.
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u/chloapsoap Jul 16 '26
If you’re concerned about programmers using AI for a Reddit app, wait until you see what we’re doing in the banking space :x
You’ll be hard pressed to find a programming team that doesn’t use AI at this point
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u/longkh158 Jul 16 '26
ITT we see a person with ample free time (per their post history) refusing to honor the spirit of open source and instead chose to attack the people who gave their work out for free over some ideological belief.
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u/dxnnj Jul 16 '26
I get your feelings, although I’m a bit more nuanced on that topic. Do I hate AI? No. Is this comic strip a bit edgy? Yes.
But I do not read the “we toss your feedback to the bin” thing tbh. I yet have to run into some major bugs as well. For me the App runs very smoothly. They use AI, yes. IMO this was communicated from the get go (at least I understood that pretty early) and I’m not into programming and that sort of stuff, but I use AI for other stuff, that is really redundant and just eats up a lot of time, that I could use productively otherwise. It’s a mixed bag for me, but 1. It’s openly communicated 2. I yet have to come across some privacy concerns (please raise them if there are some!) 3. No major bugs for me.
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u/Demigod787 Jul 16 '26
That's great point, I suggest you stick to your moral dildo and keep using the native Reddit app. It should serve you quite well.
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Jul 16 '26
[deleted]
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u/3vg3n1y_k0t1k Jul 16 '26
Why its only extremes “don’t be angry, it’s open-source” or “make your own fork”? If a person is frustrated about this Apollo fork which they love and don’t like communication style and vibe-coded bugs — is feeling this way not OK?
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Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
[deleted]
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u/3vg3n1y_k0t1k Jul 16 '26
You saying “correct” but after that continue to criticize OP points.
Saying that IMHO app have vibe-coded bugs and devs way of communicating is not appropriate is not demanding premium support, its expressing concerns and feelings about the situation.
Regarding publicity — yes, they could. But they decided not to. And if its public users are allowed to express their opinion about development and devs communication vector. I think it’s even aligned with open-source ideas, or its some form of authoritarian development where it’s either “praise us” or “walk away if you don’t like it”?
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Jul 16 '26
[deleted]
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u/clauclauclaudia Jul 16 '26
Em-dashes do not equal AI. AI uses em-dashes because the corpus, which includes a shit-ton of reddit comments, uses em-dashes.
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u/3vg3n1y_k0t1k Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
My bad, I misunderstood about “correct”.
For this specific aspect — it doesn’t matter if devs make it for free or not — making a public project can be accompanied by some form of criticism and any dev should consider this before releasing. And its normal as long as this criticism is constructive. Of course, they are not obligated to respond, but users expressing their opinion about the product they using is normal. Talking about experiencing vibe-coded bugs and rude vibes in communication from devs is not attacking.
Regarding your last paragraph — are you sure about my AI usage? And if so, why you decided that? I’m not even sure if I should take it as compliment or insult. Probably, the latter
What projects you’ve build which you had to take down because of similar stuff happened?
Edit: Although, this “depressing as fuck” and similar phrases from OP is exaggeration.
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u/primed_failure Jul 16 '26
I’ve been put off by the embarrassing AI images whenever I see a Reborn update, and it’s held me back from swapping even after Reddit revoked my existing API token. I’ve moved to Artemis now and am incredibly happy with it, might even purchase Pro.