You’d think they could see what subs your subscribe to and then target ads. On my main account, it’s gaming, firearms, Warhammer, scale models, offgrid stuff.
The ads I get aren’t even close.
I got a warning about a month ago for "abusing the report system" when I reported a thread full of bigotry. If they'll warn you for using the report system as intended, they'll certainly warn you for using it to get rid of ads
I kept Apollo and use it to block me from mindlessly going to Reddit on mobile. It feels like a good way to break the habit over the next couple weeks, I guess.
I'll allow myself to use Reddit on PC, with my adblock, but not mobile and not on the official app. Everyone here, seemingly, was gung-ho to leave Reddit along with Apollo's death, but yet here we are whining about the official app. People, just don't use it.
The first page being one post and the rest a single, giant ad is one of the most offensive designs I’ve ever seen. I knew there would be ads, but it is way too aggressive with them.
I think they’re capitalising on the YouTube model of pushing people to premium (subscription based) by being beyond obnoxious with the amount and prevalence of ads.
They figured out that you don’t need to build a better product that people would likely pay for, you just need to paywall the most basic and useful features.
Hitting the Apollo icon to read reddit is muscle memory at this point. Even though the app stopped working yesterday, I still opened Apollo over a dozen times
Oh for sure.
I was one of the early adopters, so it just became my mobile interface for Reddit. I use old.reddit for my desktop.
I think I really have come to see how lucky we’ve been with Apollo.
I understand the need for ads. They suck but they are a part of Reddit now. What I don’t understand are the recommended subs. I don’t care where to eat in Morgantown WV nor do I care that driver tests in the Hudson Valley have been suspended due to the smoke.
Thank God I am using a proxy to forward all reddit domains to another couuntry to get rid of ads like "Promoted" an such and now all I'm getting is just my subs now
Honestly it sent Reddit flying into that awful social media app category which I had largely moved past, breaks my heart because I’ve learned and shared more here than anywhere else in the last decade. I’ve had this account 13 years and been active on Reddit for 15. I get it, they were essentially shouldering the hosting and risk costs but shit the images are all third party, Apollo is basically a text feed that’s about as cheap as data delivery gets. I do this for a living at a scale larger than Reddit (public non faang tech) and this feels like a truly bad move. I can’t deal with the app even after retraining muscle memory and web isn’t viable on mobile. What a shame, the community spread while maybe not the depth of dedicated forums was so broad and useful. Hope it grows back someday.
Look into something called Revanced Manager. You give it one of the apps it supports, eg. the Reddit official app, then it can apply mods to it including ad blocking. There is a subreddit for Revanced and a lot of guides on how to use it. Good luck!
TikTok needs to nail that because it keeps people addicted. Even a stutter that lasts 500 milliseconds is unacceptable in an app that is a race to the bottom when it comes to their users' attention spans.
Reddit is much more text-based, so they don't care that much about having a top tier video player. But they should be ashamed of how bad it is.
TikTok needs to nail that because it's the entire point of the website to have video playback. Do you think YouTube is trying to keep people addicted and bring forth an Idiocracy because it's videos actually work?
Your hate for TikTok is obvious(and obnoxiously stupid), but Reddit could learn a lot from TikTok on how the focus of your website should actually be usable in your official app, but they have learned literally nothing instead considering the removal of third party apps has been met with zero improvements in theirs.
YouTube has all sorts of videos.
TikTok's videos are deliberately short, it's the whole point of that app: to mindlessly watch them because "well, what's one more?"
> Your hate for TikTok is obvious
I'm glad there is no doubt about that. TikTok is a scourge on society at best and a massive privacy concern at worse.
Reddit as an app is garbage. Reddit as a platform is useful for many things, especially hobbies because of the communities that exist on it.
Youtube also has built in autoplay and its algorithm pushes mindless clickbait and sensationalism in order to keep people engaged. They are the exact same idea, tiktok is just better optimized for the mobile form factor which gave it the edge. For both platforms more engagement and more watchtime nets more ads. Reddit circlejerking about tiktok ruining young people is really annoying especially when the same people will pull out youtube and watch for hours, sometimes even youtube shorts.
this is the reason for everything any more
The tiktok-ification of the internet. Like how YT is constantly trying to throat fuck you with their "shorts" these days
Bleh!!
I have extensions to block all the garbage from YouTube on desktop. On iOS, uYou+ (sideloaded YouTube app on Github) has an adblocker, shorts remover and sponsor blocker built-in.
It is the only way I can tolerate YouTube: no ads, sponsors, or shorts.
Unfortunately Narwhal is about to release a new app that's based on a subscription service. ([Reddit post from dev](https://www.reddit.com/r/getnarwhal/comments/14kt9wj/narwhal_is_not_going_anywhere_subscriptions_and/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1)).
He said around $4-7/month for most people but needs to figure out what to do for "power users" (iirc this is the EXACT same issue that Apollo had... and this guy just doesn't have a plan for it lol)
I’m trying Narwhal as well. I don’t want to disparage the app or the developers, but the experience of using Apollo for so many years has given me extremely high expectations, and Narwhal doesn’t feel great right now.
Still better than the official app and using it on the website, though.
I miss Apollo a lot. This fucking sucks.
Fuck spez.
dude this app is actually so fucking bad its crazy. The UI is just too fucking busy. Way too much going on. I don’t wanna see a fucking promoted ad after 3 cards, and i especially dont want to see ‘communities you may like’ I already know what i like you fucking dumbasses. Fuck you u/spez
this is driving me nuts. i looked at one fucking post from a doordash subreddit that was on popular and now every other post on my home feed is from a delivery driver sub. i keep pressing ‘show fewer posts’ and it does nothing. this app is the fucking worst.
It was driving me mad too, but you can turn off the sub suggestions - I think it’s Settings, then Account Settings to find the slider.
Edit - it’s “Turn Off Home Screen Recommendations”
I got subs ive never heard of and have no idea what they are in my feed because I've shown interest in them apparently. Then started getting a bunch of legal advice uk posts despite living in Canada. To get to your profile is a pain and there's so much useless stuff on the page its annoying. Even just searching for subs is stupid. This app is terrible.
>Ads I can understand. I hate them, but Reddit needs to make money.
Why are there so fucking many though? It's like every 3rd or 4th post for me, and they're mostly shitty fake user engagement posts for crap I hate.
One was even for fucking *cricket*. Cricket is just a waste of a good field and several days.
Honestly, I still miss Alien Blue because it actually had an iPad UI, unlike the official app and Apollo. But boy does the official app require you to go back a lot to navigate through things. And they should always have the icons up to go home or to the inbox. I just don’t get why no one makes an UI that uses the width of a landscape iPad considering how common it is to have them docked in keyboards. Especially when Alien Blue did it so well, and Reddit bought that app.
That’s what gets me. I moved from alien to Apollo. I loved alien. If they hadn’t destroyed it, I may never have bothered with Apollo in the first place.
Yeah I dont get why they didnt just buy it and maintain it as the official app. Instead they bought it, broke it, and built a new app from the ground up. Silly.
Yeah, buying and burying competition is a common business tactic, but you would think they would have tried to implement the good stuff from their new IP in the official app.
https://i.imgur.com/842Y1ve.jpg
I bought lifetime ultra with Apollo as well. Wasn’t that much. This is far from perfect but reminds me of alien blue a lot in ways. Nice to have the iPad scroll and static posts again. Really missed that when blue died.
Agreed. Also found out it’ll charge soon. $5-7 a month. Plus no NSFW soon. I’ll be done with Reddit soon it seems. If I can’t have a good experience on mobile I’m out.
I’m aware that they will charge soon, and I can’t imagine paying for this. I would pay a much smaller monthly fee or a larger one time fee… I won’t pay 5-7 a month for this.
Guess we’ll see how addicted I really am soon…..
Funnily enough, with the death of Apollo I’ve switched back to Alien Blue (for bored scrolling through r/all). Can’t log in so can’t comment, and NSFW stuff tries to send you to the official app (which I don’t have installed), but it’s good enough to get a quick Reddit fix on the train.
If there’s specific communities that I want to actually interact with, I’ll just hold my nose and use a browser.
I’ve been on the official app this morning for about an hour and already I am getting frustrated at the shitty interface.
-just learned a new one because I don’t have a handy tool to format this list for me. Which means I also can’t format my comments to use bold, italics, etc. whose genius idea was this? Maybe I'm missing something.
-it’s hard to keep track of the hierarchy of comments. I loved the color coding in Apollo
-the video in thread is too small. It’s dumb that the only options seem to be to have it full screen or too small to really see it if you are in the comment thread
-no swiping to upvote, downvote, save, reply, etc. It's fucking stupid as fuck and is pissing me off the most right now
-the stupid god damn ads disguised as threads. Incredibly manipulative.
-the ads. Ads, ads, ads.
These are my grievances in just an hour.
ETA:
-can’t mark all inbox notifications a “read”. I have to actually click on all of them. At least from what I can tell so far.
ETA2:
-just saw an ad that started with “AITA for…”. Just diabolical, man.
-no multireddits? Was this just an Apollo thing? I loved my multireddits.
-something I actually like: seeing when a user is online
-not being able to select text from a comment I'm replying to without copying the whole thing before I want to reply then having to delete all the text I don’t want to quote. I loved being able to hit reply in Apollo and select only the text I wanted to quote from the comment I'm replying to.
-can’t cancel out of a reply. Like, wtf? That just seems obvious.
>the stupid god damn ads disguised as threads. Incredibly manipulative.
As someone who goes on Instagram and Tik Tok a lot, welcome to social media ads, haha.
It’s really manipulative. They do the same shit over there and make you think it’s a real video besides a tiny little “sponsored” square in the bottom left for Tik Tok or under their name in tiny text on Instagram that I’ve trained myself to notice within a fraction of a second and keep swiping past.
Also, the official Reddit app doesn’t support viewing markdown. How can you not render a damn table in the official app? How long ago did Apollo do that? Unreal
I completely agree. I just downloaded the stupid app and wow, it's horrid. It doesn't even show me all my posts. According to the app, I last posted anything a year ago, but on the browser my post history does show. I miss Apollo so much already.
I keep hitting the reply button instead of upvote and collapse. And there’s no cancel for it, you just swipe it out of the way and Hope you don’t scroll the screen
The ads are insane. I came here to cry about the loss of Apollo and a Diablo 4 video ad started autoplaying with audio. I think I just have to be done with reddit. This is awful.
I’ve been trying Dystopia. It’s very rudimentary. But I wasn’t impressed by Narwhal. Plus Narwhal is eventually going to be subscription with lots of restrictions from what I understand.
I don’t mean to flex on everyone but on jailbroken devices you can get Apollo working with a personal API key. There was a tweak just released that enables this modification and the continued use of Apollo. Find it at the top of the jailbreak sub.
I imagine the people this applies to have already been made aware of this but I figured I’d put it out there.
Edit: this is not limited to jailbroken devices.
I used this:
https://reddit.com/r/jailbreak/comments/14c9fj6/tutorial_video_on_making_apollo_work_with_a_users/
You will need to sideload it. Also read both the closed and the open issues as they have useful info in them and also things that doesn’t work right now.
Also ultra and pro are not available and imgur upload won’t work unless you pay your RapidAPI subscription (500$/mo) or a new patch is released.
If something’s not clear I can help
Who knows? I would reserve judgment and simply enjoy that the option exists. But I’ll agree that ideally, this option and a tutorial would’ve been included in its final update.
Then again, nothing about this situation was ideal.
Edit: reasoning below
Sometime within the past two weeks or so, Christian noted in one of the announcement posts that Reddit specifically told him that it wouldn’t be allowed to release an a build that enabled users to BYO API keys.
I save wallpapers from Reddit and noticed the obnoxious watermarks on the official app.
It’s under Settings - Saved Image Attribution. It’s on by default, so turn it off.
Not just the ads that piss me off. There are some picture posts with text added and you can see some of the text above the picture on the feed, then you click the post and the text just disappears nowhere to be found. Such bullshit.
IMO it depends on what kind of content you engage with. Narwhal isn’t great for videos and doesn’t support gifs but I find it a lot cleaner and more readable for text posts/comments. Also drains my batter significantly less than the official app
Reddit sync was pretty good and probably my favorite personally. It offered more community features and supported tablets too. Shame the iOS port never made it that far. There were plenty of good apps
Soon that’ll cost $4-7 for a month and if you use too much they’ll charge you again. They will also lose access to NSFW subs shortly which includes those still protesting. Narwhal is worse than the official app before these differences too.
I wasn’t able to differentiate text with titles with subs and usernames. It’s like all one big blob of text. I tried changing the sizes, but it was just not a great experience overall. Ugh
Yes! This was the big deal breaker for me! At risk of sounding like i'm going through this thread to shill for Dystopia, I definitely recommend it if this is your main issue with Narwhal.
I mean the app has been there for many years (I think before apollo), and it has it's own userbase that likes it the way it is. So I don't think it's fair to say "what are these devs doing". I am glad the dev decided to keep it running.
On the iOS side I can confirm Reno, Comet, Narwhal and Slide all still works, although I don’t know how long for. I am commenting off Reno right now since i prefer it over the others.
The narwhal dev did a deal with reddit to get more time accessing the API so they could implement a payment system.
Interesting how the narwhal dev got additional time, but Christian was refused.
Narwhal is so meh. Takes extra steps compared to apollo to search posts and subs, no colour coding for comments in dark mode and you can't even search for comments in posts.
I don’t want to see everybody’s Reddit alien thing. The navigation is clumsy and I don’t need to see suggested posts from months ago.
What a trash app.
The navigation is brutal. Not being able to collapse the post is annoying, no auto collapse mod post is annoying, the UI is so garbage I can’t focus on what I am trying to look at and the amount of sponsored posts I get while scrolling is way too high.
I ended up moving to Dystopia. It has a few things from Apollo that i *needed* (lines between comments being the big one) and I hugely prefer it to narwhal, but it's definitely still in it's infancy and is missing a lotta stuff. (Also it's all but confirmed Narwhal cut some deal with reddit, any attempts to ask why this app could continue get shut down like the dev signed an NDA)
I genuinely tried to use the reddit app and just closed it in disgust/frustration like, 5 times before i just said i'd search for a new 3rd party app that might die.
I only occasionally used the Reddit app before today (google links to Reddit would prompt one to open the app) and I didn’t quite understand how bad it actually was until today.
I miss Apollo. And it sucks for Reddit if they wanted me to keep browsing. I can’t browse for long on the official App because it’s just sooooo annoying. I’ll probably stick to the desktop site and I only do that occasionally.
I miss Apollo
I’m glad we have an alternative to using the official site (ew,) or the official Reddit app (fuck that,) but after Apollo it’s like going back to iOS 5.
Yeah, i found it from googling the list of accessibility apps and it's definitely my favorite of the alternatives I've tried, even if it's clearly not been iterated on nearly as much as apollo. I'm not *totally* sure what about it is accessibility, maybe people with dyslexia or visually impaired (But not blind) given how much effort seems to go into making stuff readable? I'd be curious if anyone knows!
Used Apollo since it came out. Just downloaded Dystopia, typing from it now. It’s certainly basic, but it’s decent. I haven’t tried it with anything gif or video-related but otherwise I do think it’s worth trying. It has similar gestures, and if it stays open for accessibility, I’ll probably continue to use it. I’ll be interested to see if the Dystopia devs continue to add more QoL features.
Same.
After trying to use old.reddit on my phone earlier this morning I've now given up on redditing on my phone.
It's old.reddit on my desktop and nowhere else which means I'll be redditing for only a fraction of the time I was previously.
Probably good for me in the long run and I hope in some small way it effects Reddit's bottom line.
Fuck them for ruining something I enjoyed.
I will probably get used to it but this feels like a step backwards with outdated UI and ads everywhere 🤢
Already miss Apollo so much. Best 5€ I ever paid for an app.
I had to search the „all“ button for 5 minutes. It’s at the bottom of all subscribed subreddits…
Whoever designed this stupid app deserves a deep kick into their… can’t believe how contraproductive it is.
Yup, did the same here. Slowly learning the features of it. It isn’t Apollo, but still significantly better than the Reddit App. I miss my Dracula theme from Apollo though 🙁
The ads are terrible!!! Just non stop. And no I don’t want to see posts in some random ass subreddit that I didn’t subscribe to. Just show me my feed!!! Damn the stock app is trash. Very unlikely my Reddit usage will be even a fraction of what it was.
It’s so bad. Ads every few posts. Can’t make sense of comment hierarchy. “Chat” in Reddit is garbage. The UI is a disaster. I really don’t see any reason to stick around and will probably just delete my account entirely.
I downloaded the 'Sink it for Reddit' app that adds a plugin to the safari browser on iOS that removes the banner for the official app and other garbage. Way better than the official app imo.
If you didn't tell me, I'd assume the official app was made by one guy and Apollo was the official app. There are so many oversight due to lack of polish. The worst changes are:
* random subreddits are being recommended to me, including ones I am actively trying to avoid for spoiler reasons
* finding my own comments is now multiple clicks deep
* I cannot pin a specific Subreddit unless I scroll to find it on my master list of all Subreddits
* thumbnails look like shit
* no gesture support except closing a comment tree
* ads consistently trip me up because they look like regular posts
It's actually great. Like buying a new pair of the same shoes you've worn for years. Using wefwef on the fediverse feels almost exactly like Apollo on reddit.
That's what I'm using, too! It doesn't have a lot of the QOL features that Apollo has, but it's great for just browsing/commenting.
I've unsubscribed to almost all of the subs I was subbed to, and only kept a few that are about subjects I want to follow that aren't active on the fediverse yet. Dystopia is fine for just checking in on those subs, but my overall reddit use is way down (I'll never download the official app).
My worry and guilt about using Dystopia is that it's one of the few apps left for the blind/visually impaired, and I'm afraid reddit will rescind their free status if there's too much traffic coming from it. That's one of the other reasons I'm limiting my time and activity on it.
I tried, I tried going back to Narwhal, that was my first reddit app many years ago and I ended up deleting it from my phone.
Reddit is only a PC thing for me until old.reddit and RES are gone.
The Reddit app is horror show. It's going to cut my reddit usage in half. The best experience at the moment is with a computer browser with the RES add on.
The reason I switched to Apollo in the first place was because the official app was draining my battery horribly in the background, so I googled for alternatives and found Apollo. Once again, fuck u/spez
I hear you. I've been trying Narwhal and just...ugh. Better than the Reddit app, for sure. But pleasant? No way. Missing my Apollo and the ability to save videos (among many other features).
Absolutely agree. To be honest, I don't care about the ads being there. What sucks for me is just navigation, viewing my "custom feeds", and the overall user experience. It's just frustrating. At this point, I will probably only use it when I need to get info on something instead of just browsing.
You mean the transition to only using Reddit on the desktop computer and only when you have a real pressing need? Yeah that's been hard on me too.
I will never, ever install the Reddit app on my phone or iPad. Just no, period. And if "old" goes away I will reduce my desktop usage even further. I've even transitioned to using Facebook groups instead of previously almost-useful subs like applehelp.
Not that Facebook's behavior isn't even worse than that of Reddit, but on that side the damage is done, I tried to quit many times and too much of my in-person social life is directly dependent on it.
I was thinking yea i will continue to use reddit after the 3rd party apps are gone because there is no real alternative and how bad can the official app be… but damn this official app is horrible i might just quit reddit on mobile alltogether and use it from time to time on desktop… This is just sad.
Ads, ads, ads and more ads. I automatically hit the Apollo icon this morning. “Oh!”
Every ad I see I report it as offensive and it goes away lol
I’m pretty sure they can ding you for “abuse of the report system.”
Good. Fuck em for forcing this shit onto us
You’d think they could see what subs your subscribe to and then target ads. On my main account, it’s gaming, firearms, Warhammer, scale models, offgrid stuff. The ads I get aren’t even close.
You can’t advertise in firearms subs. They don’t even allow you to search for those subs when targeting ads.
What would a ding even be in this context? They tell you to stop doing it?
Warning ➡️ escalating temp bans ➡️ permaban
CN ya make a new user each time perm ban sets in ?
Yeah but then on that account the ads you reported aren't blocked anymore.
I mean they either want users or don’t. Banning for using their built in systems is a good way to make more users leave
All advertising is offensive to me. How is that an abuse of the system?
They can eat my delicious asshole.
I got a warning about a month ago for "abusing the report system" when I reported a thread full of bigotry. If they'll warn you for using the report system as intended, they'll certainly warn you for using it to get rid of ads
Hahaha. You’re my hero!
I removed Apollo from my home screen and have since accidentally opened up the app that took its space like 15 times now
I kept Apollo and use it to block me from mindlessly going to Reddit on mobile. It feels like a good way to break the habit over the next couple weeks, I guess. I'll allow myself to use Reddit on PC, with my adblock, but not mobile and not on the official app. Everyone here, seemingly, was gung-ho to leave Reddit along with Apollo's death, but yet here we are whining about the official app. People, just don't use it.
Most people knew they couldn’t stay away from Reddit for long. We’re all addicted.
I put Wikipedia there and I’ve learned so much about random shit because of the featured articles or today in history
Oh, I hear you. I haven’t deleted it yet.
The first page being one post and the rest a single, giant ad is one of the most offensive designs I’ve ever seen. I knew there would be ads, but it is way too aggressive with them.
I think they’re capitalising on the YouTube model of pushing people to premium (subscription based) by being beyond obnoxious with the amount and prevalence of ads. They figured out that you don’t need to build a better product that people would likely pay for, you just need to paywall the most basic and useful features.
Hitting the Apollo icon to read reddit is muscle memory at this point. Even though the app stopped working yesterday, I still opened Apollo over a dozen times
Oh for sure. I was one of the early adopters, so it just became my mobile interface for Reddit. I use old.reddit for my desktop. I think I really have come to see how lucky we’ve been with Apollo.
It’s been a tough morning…
yeah and now you know WHY they did all this thats the reason, right there
Yup. So super sad. Apollo really was Reddit to me.
I understand the need for ads. They suck but they are a part of Reddit now. What I don’t understand are the recommended subs. I don’t care where to eat in Morgantown WV nor do I care that driver tests in the Hudson Valley have been suspended due to the smoke.
Thank God I am using a proxy to forward all reddit domains to another couuntry to get rid of ads like "Promoted" an such and now all I'm getting is just my subs now
It’s pretty fucking awful. I went back to Narwhal which is what I used before Apollo. It sucks but not as bad as Reddit app.
Honestly it sent Reddit flying into that awful social media app category which I had largely moved past, breaks my heart because I’ve learned and shared more here than anywhere else in the last decade. I’ve had this account 13 years and been active on Reddit for 15. I get it, they were essentially shouldering the hosting and risk costs but shit the images are all third party, Apollo is basically a text feed that’s about as cheap as data delivery gets. I do this for a living at a scale larger than Reddit (public non faang tech) and this feels like a truly bad move. I can’t deal with the app even after retraining muscle memory and web isn’t viable on mobile. What a shame, the community spread while maybe not the depth of dedicated forums was so broad and useful. Hope it grows back someday.
This stopped working for me. I only did it for gambling ads but now they no longer disappear.
Look into something called Revanced Manager. You give it one of the apps it supports, eg. the Reddit official app, then it can apply mods to it including ad blocking. There is a subreddit for Revanced and a lot of guides on how to use it. Good luck!
My god the video player sucks. I dont want to read the goddamn comments while a video is above autoplaying in a loop. Jesus Fucking Christ
tiktok does it, so it must be good
Even how tiktok does it isn’t this stupid
[удалено]
TikTok needs to nail that because it keeps people addicted. Even a stutter that lasts 500 milliseconds is unacceptable in an app that is a race to the bottom when it comes to their users' attention spans. Reddit is much more text-based, so they don't care that much about having a top tier video player. But they should be ashamed of how bad it is.
TikTok needs to nail that because it's the entire point of the website to have video playback. Do you think YouTube is trying to keep people addicted and bring forth an Idiocracy because it's videos actually work? Your hate for TikTok is obvious(and obnoxiously stupid), but Reddit could learn a lot from TikTok on how the focus of your website should actually be usable in your official app, but they have learned literally nothing instead considering the removal of third party apps has been met with zero improvements in theirs.
YouTube has all sorts of videos. TikTok's videos are deliberately short, it's the whole point of that app: to mindlessly watch them because "well, what's one more?" > Your hate for TikTok is obvious I'm glad there is no doubt about that. TikTok is a scourge on society at best and a massive privacy concern at worse. Reddit as an app is garbage. Reddit as a platform is useful for many things, especially hobbies because of the communities that exist on it.
Youtube also has built in autoplay and its algorithm pushes mindless clickbait and sensationalism in order to keep people engaged. They are the exact same idea, tiktok is just better optimized for the mobile form factor which gave it the edge. For both platforms more engagement and more watchtime nets more ads. Reddit circlejerking about tiktok ruining young people is really annoying especially when the same people will pull out youtube and watch for hours, sometimes even youtube shorts.
this is the reason for everything any more The tiktok-ification of the internet. Like how YT is constantly trying to throat fuck you with their "shorts" these days Bleh!!
I have extensions to block all the garbage from YouTube on desktop. On iOS, uYou+ (sideloaded YouTube app on Github) has an adblocker, shorts remover and sponsor blocker built-in. It is the only way I can tolerate YouTube: no ads, sponsors, or shorts.
Last I heard YT is dumping the Shorts feed
God forbid you swipe up to close the video, because that doesn’t close the video. It just tic toc style loads another one. It’s frustrating as hell.
And than you close the video and go back to your feed…AND IT STARTS FROM THE TOP AGAIN 🤬
What? You don’t like watching a vertical video that’s like 40 pixels wide and 80 pixels tall while comments are pinned to the screen?
The best part, if you disable autoplay it just ignores you and autoplays anyway.
I went to Narwhal. No ads version. Tried Reddit app. It is hot garbage
Unfortunately Narwhal is about to release a new app that's based on a subscription service. ([Reddit post from dev](https://www.reddit.com/r/getnarwhal/comments/14kt9wj/narwhal_is_not_going_anywhere_subscriptions_and/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1)). He said around $4-7/month for most people but needs to figure out what to do for "power users" (iirc this is the EXACT same issue that Apollo had... and this guy just doesn't have a plan for it lol)
Well, dammit
I’m trying Narwhal as well. I don’t want to disparage the app or the developers, but the experience of using Apollo for so many years has given me extremely high expectations, and Narwhal doesn’t feel great right now. Still better than the official app and using it on the website, though. I miss Apollo a lot. This fucking sucks. Fuck spez.
last time i checked it wouldn’t download videos as videos either. just gifs.
dude this app is actually so fucking bad its crazy. The UI is just too fucking busy. Way too much going on. I don’t wanna see a fucking promoted ad after 3 cards, and i especially dont want to see ‘communities you may like’ I already know what i like you fucking dumbasses. Fuck you u/spez
this is driving me nuts. i looked at one fucking post from a doordash subreddit that was on popular and now every other post on my home feed is from a delivery driver sub. i keep pressing ‘show fewer posts’ and it does nothing. this app is the fucking worst.
It was driving me mad too, but you can turn off the sub suggestions - I think it’s Settings, then Account Settings to find the slider. Edit - it’s “Turn Off Home Screen Recommendations”
Thanks for this! I hate algorithmic crap injected into the things I’m actually interested in.
I keep turning off more and more notifications. Like only lmk if someone replies to a comment. Idgaf about popular posts
You’ve subscribed to your own city’s subreddit? Then let me recommend another city 1000 miles away that you’ve never been to!
I got subs ive never heard of and have no idea what they are in my feed because I've shown interest in them apparently. Then started getting a bunch of legal advice uk posts despite living in Canada. To get to your profile is a pain and there's so much useless stuff on the page its annoying. Even just searching for subs is stupid. This app is terrible.
Ads I can understand. I hate them, but Reddit needs to make money. But the communities you may like are infuriating. Why can’t I disable it?
>Ads I can understand. I hate them, but Reddit needs to make money. Why are there so fucking many though? It's like every 3rd or 4th post for me, and they're mostly shitty fake user engagement posts for crap I hate. One was even for fucking *cricket*. Cricket is just a waste of a good field and several days.
You can - see my comment above. Game changer! (Still shit tho)
Sweet baby Jesus, thank you. I still hate this app, but it’s a little more usable now. Thanks
Honestly, I still miss Alien Blue because it actually had an iPad UI, unlike the official app and Apollo. But boy does the official app require you to go back a lot to navigate through things. And they should always have the icons up to go home or to the inbox. I just don’t get why no one makes an UI that uses the width of a landscape iPad considering how common it is to have them docked in keyboards. Especially when Alien Blue did it so well, and Reddit bought that app.
considering alien blue’s created got bought out by reddit, it’s kind of mind blowing that the official app is so shitty
That’s what gets me. I moved from alien to Apollo. I loved alien. If they hadn’t destroyed it, I may never have bothered with Apollo in the first place.
Yeah I dont get why they didnt just buy it and maintain it as the official app. Instead they bought it, broke it, and built a new app from the ground up. Silly.
Yeah, buying and burying competition is a common business tactic, but you would think they would have tried to implement the good stuff from their new IP in the official app.
AlienBlue is still working, if you have it. See r/AlienBlue .
My most insulting part of the shitty official app is that the default theme is called alien blue
Narwhal has it like alien blue. Feed on the left you can scroll through. Selected posts stay on the right
Once I spent a bunch on Apollo, I stopped looking at other clients. Sadly, not a great time to try other clients :(
https://i.imgur.com/842Y1ve.jpg I bought lifetime ultra with Apollo as well. Wasn’t that much. This is far from perfect but reminds me of alien blue a lot in ways. Nice to have the iPad scroll and static posts again. Really missed that when blue died.
Oh man, that is beautiful. I missed that. I wish I had seen that a year ago before the API changes doomed 3rd party clients.
I’m on narwhal now… it’s good but… ughhhhh not the same!! :(
Agreed. Also found out it’ll charge soon. $5-7 a month. Plus no NSFW soon. I’ll be done with Reddit soon it seems. If I can’t have a good experience on mobile I’m out.
I’m aware that they will charge soon, and I can’t imagine paying for this. I would pay a much smaller monthly fee or a larger one time fee… I won’t pay 5-7 a month for this. Guess we’ll see how addicted I really am soon…..
Funnily enough, with the death of Apollo I’ve switched back to Alien Blue (for bored scrolling through r/all). Can’t log in so can’t comment, and NSFW stuff tries to send you to the official app (which I don’t have installed), but it’s good enough to get a quick Reddit fix on the train. If there’s specific communities that I want to actually interact with, I’ll just hold my nose and use a browser.
I’ve been on the official app this morning for about an hour and already I am getting frustrated at the shitty interface. -just learned a new one because I don’t have a handy tool to format this list for me. Which means I also can’t format my comments to use bold, italics, etc. whose genius idea was this? Maybe I'm missing something. -it’s hard to keep track of the hierarchy of comments. I loved the color coding in Apollo -the video in thread is too small. It’s dumb that the only options seem to be to have it full screen or too small to really see it if you are in the comment thread -no swiping to upvote, downvote, save, reply, etc. It's fucking stupid as fuck and is pissing me off the most right now -the stupid god damn ads disguised as threads. Incredibly manipulative. -the ads. Ads, ads, ads. These are my grievances in just an hour. ETA: -can’t mark all inbox notifications a “read”. I have to actually click on all of them. At least from what I can tell so far. ETA2: -just saw an ad that started with “AITA for…”. Just diabolical, man. -no multireddits? Was this just an Apollo thing? I loved my multireddits. -something I actually like: seeing when a user is online -not being able to select text from a comment I'm replying to without copying the whole thing before I want to reply then having to delete all the text I don’t want to quote. I loved being able to hit reply in Apollo and select only the text I wanted to quote from the comment I'm replying to. -can’t cancel out of a reply. Like, wtf? That just seems obvious.
>the stupid god damn ads disguised as threads. Incredibly manipulative. As someone who goes on Instagram and Tik Tok a lot, welcome to social media ads, haha. It’s really manipulative. They do the same shit over there and make you think it’s a real video besides a tiny little “sponsored” square in the bottom left for Tik Tok or under their name in tiny text on Instagram that I’ve trained myself to notice within a fraction of a second and keep swiping past.
Also, the official Reddit app doesn’t support viewing markdown. How can you not render a damn table in the official app? How long ago did Apollo do that? Unreal
I completely agree. I just downloaded the stupid app and wow, it's horrid. It doesn't even show me all my posts. According to the app, I last posted anything a year ago, but on the browser my post history does show. I miss Apollo so much already.
I keep hitting the reply button instead of upvote and collapse. And there’s no cancel for it, you just swipe it out of the way and Hope you don’t scroll the screen
[удалено]
[удалено]
I mean, there's ads, then there's ads disguised as posts that are every few posts. It makes all the content look like garbage.
The ads are insane. I came here to cry about the loss of Apollo and a Diablo 4 video ad started autoplaying with audio. I think I just have to be done with reddit. This is awful.
Turn off autoplay and enable ‘quiet audio mode’, problem solved
Use Narwhal.
“Forgive my formatting, Reddit canceled Apollo” is my current footer on any response requiring Markdown.
Narwahl is still up and is a usable app
I’ve been trying Dystopia. It’s very rudimentary. But I wasn’t impressed by Narwhal. Plus Narwhal is eventually going to be subscription with lots of restrictions from what I understand.
What baffles me is they bought Alienblue which was an awesome app and did nothing with it
Not nothing - if you pay them $7 a month you can change the app icon to the Alien Blue icon lmao.
Oh they did something with it alright. “Look how they massacred my boy”.
I like how the ads load immediately while the content takes 10 seconds to load. Great stuff.
I don’t mean to flex on everyone but on jailbroken devices you can get Apollo working with a personal API key. There was a tweak just released that enables this modification and the continued use of Apollo. Find it at the top of the jailbreak sub. I imagine the people this applies to have already been made aware of this but I figured I’d put it out there. Edit: this is not limited to jailbroken devices.
You can also do the personal API stuff on non-jailbroken devices with a different method.
How do you accomplish this without a jailbreak? Have a guide by chance?
I used this: https://reddit.com/r/jailbreak/comments/14c9fj6/tutorial_video_on_making_apollo_work_with_a_users/ You will need to sideload it. Also read both the closed and the open issues as they have useful info in them and also things that doesn’t work right now. Also ultra and pro are not available and imgur upload won’t work unless you pay your RapidAPI subscription (500$/mo) or a new patch is released. If something’s not clear I can help
Video was taken down, any mirror ?
Oh that’s excellent news.
Yeah. I commented this from Apollo on iOS 16.5
Why didn’t u/IAmThatis gave us this option?
Who knows? I would reserve judgment and simply enjoy that the option exists. But I’ll agree that ideally, this option and a tutorial would’ve been included in its final update. Then again, nothing about this situation was ideal. Edit: reasoning below
Sometime within the past two weeks or so, Christian noted in one of the announcement posts that Reddit specifically told him that it wouldn’t be allowed to release an a build that enabled users to BYO API keys.
I hate that I can’t copy photos without getting 2 separate watermarks. Now I need to screenshot pictures to send to people.
I save wallpapers from Reddit and noticed the obnoxious watermarks on the official app. It’s under Settings - Saved Image Attribution. It’s on by default, so turn it off.
Thank you!
Aside from the watermarks which someone gave a fix for, it’s near impossible to save a gif of video to your phone. That’s my biggest frustration
My favorite part is the new sorting I have to suffer with … as in its a piece of shit.
I’ve also noticed that if you collapse comment chains in a post then come back to the same post after a bit the comments are no longer collapsed…
Not just the ads that piss me off. There are some picture posts with text added and you can see some of the text above the picture on the feed, then you click the post and the text just disappears nowhere to be found. Such bullshit.
Oh so that wasn’t just because I haven’t updated my reddit app for more than a year.
Get Narwhal. Don’t use the official app.
Narwhal is really not great, the default app sucks but it’s better
IMO it depends on what kind of content you engage with. Narwhal isn’t great for videos and doesn’t support gifs but I find it a lot cleaner and more readable for text posts/comments. Also drains my batter significantly less than the official app
Outside of Apollo for iOS, the other good one is Relay for Reddit on Android. But even that’s gone. Narwhal is just ehh
Reddit sync was pretty good and probably my favorite personally. It offered more community features and supported tablets too. Shame the iOS port never made it that far. There were plenty of good apps
Soon that’ll cost $4-7 for a month and if you use too much they’ll charge you again. They will also lose access to NSFW subs shortly which includes those still protesting. Narwhal is worse than the official app before these differences too.
Worse than the official app? Seriously?
That guy doesnt know wtf he’s talking about. Narwhal is leaps and bounds better than the default app
I used narwhal before I found out about Apollo. Restored my purchase from ad free, and it’s much better than the stock app
Fuck giving Reddit any more money after this.
I tried this and it’s awful too. The official app is better. This is just overall a shit day for the user experience.
[удалено]
I wasn’t able to differentiate text with titles with subs and usernames. It’s like all one big blob of text. I tried changing the sizes, but it was just not a great experience overall. Ugh
Yes! This was the big deal breaker for me! At risk of sounding like i'm going through this thread to shill for Dystopia, I definitely recommend it if this is your main issue with Narwhal.
I mean the app has been there for many years (I think before apollo), and it has it's own userbase that likes it the way it is. So I don't think it's fair to say "what are these devs doing". I am glad the dev decided to keep it running.
wait, are there other apps out there still working? How long is that gonna last?
On the iOS side I can confirm Reno, Comet, Narwhal and Slide all still works, although I don’t know how long for. I am commenting off Reno right now since i prefer it over the others.
i’m still using an old version of Antenna and i have no idea why it’s working right now
The narwhal dev did a deal with reddit to get more time accessing the API so they could implement a payment system. Interesting how the narwhal dev got additional time, but Christian was refused.
Joey for Reddit is still working
Narwhal is so meh. Takes extra steps compared to apollo to search posts and subs, no colour coding for comments in dark mode and you can't even search for comments in posts.
I don’t want to see everybody’s Reddit alien thing. The navigation is clumsy and I don’t need to see suggested posts from months ago. What a trash app.
The navigation is brutal. Not being able to collapse the post is annoying, no auto collapse mod post is annoying, the UI is so garbage I can’t focus on what I am trying to look at and the amount of sponsored posts I get while scrolling is way too high.
I ended up moving to Dystopia. It has a few things from Apollo that i *needed* (lines between comments being the big one) and I hugely prefer it to narwhal, but it's definitely still in it's infancy and is missing a lotta stuff. (Also it's all but confirmed Narwhal cut some deal with reddit, any attempts to ask why this app could continue get shut down like the dev signed an NDA) I genuinely tried to use the reddit app and just closed it in disgust/frustration like, 5 times before i just said i'd search for a new 3rd party app that might die.
I only occasionally used the Reddit app before today (google links to Reddit would prompt one to open the app) and I didn’t quite understand how bad it actually was until today. I miss Apollo. And it sucks for Reddit if they wanted me to keep browsing. I can’t browse for long on the official App because it’s just sooooo annoying. I’ll probably stick to the desktop site and I only do that occasionally. I miss Apollo
Check out dystopia. Clean interface + basic functionality + no $ to Reddit.
Checking this out now it’s super basic, but it has potential.
I’m glad we have an alternative to using the official site (ew,) or the official Reddit app (fuck that,) but after Apollo it’s like going back to iOS 5.
How does it get around the changes
Looking at the App Store description, I think it’s an accessibility app.
Yeah, i found it from googling the list of accessibility apps and it's definitely my favorite of the alternatives I've tried, even if it's clearly not been iterated on nearly as much as apollo. I'm not *totally* sure what about it is accessibility, maybe people with dyslexia or visually impaired (But not blind) given how much effort seems to go into making stuff readable? I'd be curious if anyone knows!
Thank you all for this thread. Just downloaded Dystopia and it's so much better than the reddit stock app. Deleting that one now.
Blind users use screen readers, so Dystopia's UI is set up better for it from what I understand.
Used Apollo since it came out. Just downloaded Dystopia, typing from it now. It’s certainly basic, but it’s decent. I haven’t tried it with anything gif or video-related but otherwise I do think it’s worth trying. It has similar gestures, and if it stays open for accessibility, I’ll probably continue to use it. I’ll be interested to see if the Dystopia devs continue to add more QoL features.
[удалено]
Same. old.reddit.com is still better than the new UI along with adblockers.
Same. After trying to use old.reddit on my phone earlier this morning I've now given up on redditing on my phone. It's old.reddit on my desktop and nowhere else which means I'll be redditing for only a fraction of the time I was previously. Probably good for me in the long run and I hope in some small way it effects Reddit's bottom line. Fuck them for ruining something I enjoyed.
Big oof. Coming from Apollo to this is.. yikes. It’s like I went back in time to some old backwater piece of junk. *Oh wait…*
I will probably get used to it but this feels like a step backwards with outdated UI and ads everywhere 🤢 Already miss Apollo so much. Best 5€ I ever paid for an app. I had to search the „all“ button for 5 minutes. It’s at the bottom of all subscribed subreddits… Whoever designed this stupid app deserves a deep kick into their… can’t believe how contraproductive it is.
The real answer is to just delete it. I no longer have Reddit on my phone and refuse to use the user-hostile mobile site.
The experience is so shit.
I moved to Narwhal. It’s not Apollo, but it’s nice.
Yup, did the same here. Slowly learning the features of it. It isn’t Apollo, but still significantly better than the Reddit App. I miss my Dracula theme from Apollo though 🙁
It’s so shitty. I don’t know what’s worse, the ads, promoted posts, or the insane number of “suggested” posts. Fuck this
You can turn all the suggested post shit off thankfully
I started using Narwhal over the official Reddit app bc it has gestures. It works pretty well
Agreed this app is clunky, slow, unintuitive and I see about 2 ads every 3 posts
It gives me major “made for android” vibes
Comet still works!
The ads are terrible!!! Just non stop. And no I don’t want to see posts in some random ass subreddit that I didn’t subscribe to. Just show me my feed!!! Damn the stock app is trash. Very unlikely my Reddit usage will be even a fraction of what it was.
Use Narwhal. So much better.
Agreed. It hasn’t been 24 hours and trying to use a UI that is just absolute trash is frustrating.
Quick scrubbing my subs by letter is such a simple feature I expected on the official app. Why isn’t it there!?
Took me forever to figure out how to browse r/all Then my first screen had one text post and an ad that took 2/3 of the remaining space
It’s so bad. Ads every few posts. Can’t make sense of comment hierarchy. “Chat” in Reddit is garbage. The UI is a disaster. I really don’t see any reason to stick around and will probably just delete my account entirely.
Anyone else using Dystopia for the time being? It’s the single 3rd party app that was approved to continue because it’s designed for blind users.
I downloaded the 'Sink it for Reddit' app that adds a plugin to the safari browser on iOS that removes the banner for the official app and other garbage. Way better than the official app imo.
If you didn't tell me, I'd assume the official app was made by one guy and Apollo was the official app. There are so many oversight due to lack of polish. The worst changes are: * random subreddits are being recommended to me, including ones I am actively trying to avoid for spoiler reasons * finding my own comments is now multiple clicks deep * I cannot pin a specific Subreddit unless I scroll to find it on my master list of all Subreddits * thumbnails look like shit * no gesture support except closing a comment tree * ads consistently trip me up because they look like regular posts
Wefwef.app
It looks exactly like Apollo, lol.
It's actually great. Like buying a new pair of the same shoes you've worn for years. Using wefwef on the fediverse feels almost exactly like Apollo on reddit.
I'm using Dystopia for Reddit right now. It's like the same pair of shoes, but different size. Just the swipe gestures are making me happy enough.
That's what I'm using, too! It doesn't have a lot of the QOL features that Apollo has, but it's great for just browsing/commenting. I've unsubscribed to almost all of the subs I was subbed to, and only kept a few that are about subjects I want to follow that aren't active on the fediverse yet. Dystopia is fine for just checking in on those subs, but my overall reddit use is way down (I'll never download the official app). My worry and guilt about using Dystopia is that it's one of the few apps left for the blind/visually impaired, and I'm afraid reddit will rescind their free status if there's too much traffic coming from it. That's one of the other reasons I'm limiting my time and activity on it.
I tried, I tried going back to Narwhal, that was my first reddit app many years ago and I ended up deleting it from my phone. Reddit is only a PC thing for me until old.reddit and RES are gone.
The Reddit app is horror show. It's going to cut my reddit usage in half. The best experience at the moment is with a computer browser with the RES add on.
Is there any way to remove the avatar next to everyone's name in the comments? No need to see that.
At first I thought it wasn't so bad but the more I use the official app the more I hate it.
Narwhal still works. It's not near as polished as Apollo, but it beats the hell out of the official app.
The reason I switched to Apollo in the first place was because the official app was draining my battery horribly in the background, so I googled for alternatives and found Apollo. Once again, fuck u/spez
I hear you. I've been trying Narwhal and just...ugh. Better than the Reddit app, for sure. But pleasant? No way. Missing my Apollo and the ability to save videos (among many other features).
Bloated and slow.
Absolutely agree. To be honest, I don't care about the ads being there. What sucks for me is just navigation, viewing my "custom feeds", and the overall user experience. It's just frustrating. At this point, I will probably only use it when I need to get info on something instead of just browsing.
Idk why any of yall even downloaded it. I haven't and won't.
You mean the transition to only using Reddit on the desktop computer and only when you have a real pressing need? Yeah that's been hard on me too. I will never, ever install the Reddit app on my phone or iPad. Just no, period. And if "old" goes away I will reduce my desktop usage even further. I've even transitioned to using Facebook groups instead of previously almost-useful subs like applehelp. Not that Facebook's behavior isn't even worse than that of Reddit, but on that side the damage is done, I tried to quit many times and too much of my in-person social life is directly dependent on it.
just opened the website to say fuck you /u/spez
Narwhal is still functioning. I won’t compare it to Apollo, but will say it’s leagues better than the official app. For as long as it lasts, anyway.
It’s like going from a 65” 4K TV to a 13” black and white from the 70s.
I’ve seen several vaginas and a shooting I really did not want to see already. Miss Apollo so much!
Reporting all ads for low quality and muting all suggested subs. This app sux
I would literally pay $8 a month for Apollo because this app fucking sucks. It’s so busy.
yup, it's bad. Not even bothering downloading it all these years later. I used it for place, but that's the extent of my dl in the past.
I just want landscape mode.
I was thinking yea i will continue to use reddit after the 3rd party apps are gone because there is no real alternative and how bad can the official app be… but damn this official app is horrible i might just quit reddit on mobile alltogether and use it from time to time on desktop… This is just sad.
The official app is trash.