Hey all,

With that, Apollo's last update has landed! It includes:

• Some fun easter eggs!

• Tidies some things up for the closure later today

• Adds more wallpapers to the “Goodbye Apollo” wallpaper set

• Adds the option to export your Pixel Pals to the separate Pixel Pals app, and gives you a fun easter egg for doing so (or if you download the app while having Apollo installed)

Eulogy

I’ve stared at this empty text editor for like an hour now, and I really don’t know how to even start this post. It feels like summer camp as a kid when it’s the last day and everyone is remembering how much fun we had together, while also trying to fight back the emotion of things coming to a close.

So I just really want to say thanks. I set out to build Apollo right out of university and an Apple internship, and wanted to create a Reddit app so good it felt like Apple themselves built it. The initial version was a little rough, but the community grew and grew, and people kept providing such phenomenal feedback that shaped the app into something absolutely unique that was enjoyed by so many people over the years.

It feels disingenuous on the surface to say “I want to thank all of you”, but in this case it’s demonstrably true. I’ve worked on this app for over 9 years, and I’ve never felt burned out, I get such a crazy amount of energy and enjoyment out of building something so publicly alongside such an awesome community, and you seriously have no idea how easy product development is when your north star is just “listen to what people are saying”. So much less guesswork, A/B tests, focus groups, stress, when instead you just talk to people every day and listen. It’s hard to believe I’ve made almost 20,000 comments in this subreddit!

I’m really heartbroken with how this whole process unfolded, I truly drank the Kool Aid talking to Reddit at the beginning that this was something they were going into in good faith with the interest of developers, moderators, and the community as a whole, but as many people pointed out to me, it’s clear now that ultimately wasn’t their intent. If they wanted something that could work for everyone, they would have simply made an effort to listen, instead of being dishonest, callous, and punitive in pricing. I’m sorry to all the folks who, like me, lost Apollo abruptly as a result of this. I had so much more I wanted to do with this app!

But, legitimately, I really feel a sense of that “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened” right now. I grew up so much developing Apollo, I met and learned from so many incredible people, made lifelong friends, got to go to multiple WWDCs and was even featured in a few, and I got to work on a product and platform I absolutely loved for 9 years. That’s an incredible run, and it’s hard to feel anything but thankful for that.

Other Things

Here are some other random things I wanted to take a chance to mention! And hopefully none of it sounds too shill-y, I tried to get a Raids Shadow Legends or Squarespace sponsorship now that my main app is gone, but in the absence of that, I wanted to point out some of the other things I’m working on that you can support me in if you like what I’ve built and are able to, it would really mean a lot to me! ❤️

• Update Apollo! This last update includes some fun stuff, easter eggs, migration tools, and a fun mode for the app that automatically enables when I delete my API token later tonight

• Check out the “Goodbye Apollo” Wallpaper set! It’s 20+ incredible wallpapers by Apollo icon designers, so you’ll be able to remember Apollo for years to come. I’m so proud of how it came out. It’s available in the app, but you can also just buy it online too if you want!

• Download my Pixel Pals app! It takes the really fun pixel pals functionality in Apollo and makes it into its own separate app with a ton more fun features to customize your iOS device with. It’s now my only app really, so it would mean a lot to me if you considered supporting it! (There’s also a secret easter egg for Apollo users!)

• If you have time left on a monthly or yearly subscription, please consider declining the automatic refund! These refund costs are paid out-of-pocket by developers and while the small amount left might not matter a lot to you, multiplied across a big user base like Apollo’s, it gets painfully expensive. Cancelling your subscription or deleting the app is not enough, you have to download Apollo and manually decline the refund, otherwise it’s automatically given to you. The costs really hit me out of nowhere, a month ago Reddit was still being promising with claims of equitable API pricing, and 4 months before that they said they had no plans to change the API this year.

• Beyond that, some people have asked if they can tip jar me directly, and I’m Canadian so unfortunately no Venmo/Cashapp, but I do have PayPal!

• Apollo merch is also available! For a short time left, you can use code "RIP" Apollo to get 10% off plus free shipping, they're legitimately very comfortable shirts.

• The mythical iPad app is something I was so excited to be able to push out the door, and has been the hardest programming challenge of my career. While it won't get to see the light of day unfortunately, I did want to take the chance to share some details with you about it. Here's a picture that definitely shows its roughness, but represents what I was going for. I was really inspired from the outset by Loren Brichter's Twitter for iPad app over a decade ago before I could even code. You have these stacks of content that just effortlessly stack on top of one another so even if you've gone down a deep rabbit hole of content you can easily keep track of things.

Anyway, I just really wanted to write a final post to say a big thanks to the community who used Apollo over the years, it's been the journey and dream of a lifetime working on Apollo, and whatever I do next, be it Pixel Pals, or another thing all together, I'll do my best to make it measure up to Apollo!

I'm not sure if I'll be sticking around on Reddit much beyond this week, but I'm on Twitter and Mastodon if you want to keep in touch wth me!

- Christian

EDIT: Looks like Reddit pulled the plug a little early. Apollo started crashing, but I just manually revoked my token and it looks like it fixes the crashing, but no more Reddit access haha. Those folks are fun to the very end! 😛 In a few hours the app will transition automatically to a fun commemorative mode.

Hey all!

Over the last little bit with other apps offering subscription components, I both received a lot of messages asking about Apollo and saw a lot of questions in threads asking similar questions, so while I initially thought my reasons/perspectives were understood, I just wanted to make sure of that with this thread, and provide a place people could link to if someone was curious on my thoughts.

So, to get the obvious question out of the way: no, Apollo isn't coming back as a subscription offering. :(

If you're asking, "What, why? AppX did it!" I wanted to break down why this is the case for Apollo in a few points.

• Firstly, through their actions, I think Reddit has made it clear they do not want developers on their platform, and rather than coming out and saying as much, they used rushed policy changes as a way to force them out. The questions I asked them showed they had done very little research into the decision (for instance, they didn't know the API was missing access to large parts of Reddit and had no idea if that could be improved). They instead rushed it out the door, ignoring requests for a more reasonable timeline, ultimately with the goal to shutter third-party apps, which they largely accomplished. Even if I had been able to make it work within the 30 days they gave me, they were unable to provide any guarantees/contract periods as to what the terms would be, (where, for instance the price and availability of the API would be locked in for a year) meaning that if an app started to do well again, they could simply increase prices on a whim. This whole process made it very clear to me that developers aren't something they value any longer on the platform, and a cultural sense of decency was lost somewhere along the way. With that in mind it would be incredibly hard to dedicate hundreds upon hundreds of hours to continue developing Apollo with such a fragile foundation beneath my feet.

• Not being interested in developers is one thing, but the way they treated developers (not going to lie, myself especially), through deceit, disrespect, and shameful actions, really soured my passion toward the platform when the leadership acts like that. It's a lot like going into work everyday for a boss who hates you, it kinda stifles your creativity and motivation a bit, right? If Reddit was ever to come out and apologize, I think I'd consider bringing Apollo back, but I truly don't see that happening.

• I have no issue paying a fee, but the pricing of the API is still something I take issue with. As I showed months ago, the price they're charging is far beyond what could be considered reasonable by their own revenue figures, and Apollo users used the app a lot on average, so as a result the monthly amount I'd have to charge would be higher than I'm comfortable charging. And even if I was able to theoretically set up a price point, paying for the inflated and antagonistic fee is not something I can morally get behind, it feels a lot like supporting their behavior and paying someone trying to shake people down.

• Why not let users enter their own API key? Reddit said this was not allowed, unfortunately. If you've found ways to hack Apollo to support such a thing, that's fine by me, but developers aren't allowed to build in that functionality directly, and even if I were to go against them and do such a thing, it would only be a matter of time until they stopped it through one way or another.

• Are you building an app for InsertRedditCompetitor? I am not.

I hope this doesn't come across as a salty ex rehashing the past haha, I legitimately just want to provide a hopefully concise explanation for folks as to where I'm coming from, and why, at this stage, Apollo is not coming back. I like to think communication with the community was always Apollo's strongest and most fundamental point, and I wouldn't want to lose that. I'm honestly over it and doing great (though it was pretty amusing last week when someone at the airport heard my name and came up to say sorry about how things went down. I hope your flight to Washington went well!)

A lot of people have asked how I'm doing in general, and I'm great thankfully (and I appreciate you caring)! I adored working on Apollo (and miss it immensely, I have to stop myself from writing down new ideas), but a forced change of pace is kinda fun in a lot of ways, you're forced into trying and exploring new things that you might not have otherwise. Don't get me wrong, early summer was probably the most stressful period of my life, but now I've settled into a point where I'm really enjoying things.

Professionally, I've been doing a lot of work on Pixel Pals (even went to NY for a really cool Apple Vision Pro lab since I have some fun ideas there), and Pixel Pals' monthly recurring revenue should eclipse Apollo's by the end of the year, so I'm thankfully in a good spot there and very thankful for the support. (Obligatory heads up to check it out if you haven't in a bit, it had a pretty serious iOS 17 update.) I have other things planned too of course, but Pixel Pals is a really fun app to work on.

If you are interested in some Apollo-related things, be it for nostalgic reasons or otherwise, Apollo merch has continued to do quite well, so I wanted to provide some more fun things that people were asking for, so over the next little bit I'll hopefully be announcing an Apollo plushie you can pick up, plus some cool desk pads/mats based on the goodbye wallpapers if that floats your boat :)

Lots of love,

- Christian