Tonight at 11:59pm Eastern, Apollo stops working. If you don't know what that is, it's a Reddit client for iOS, made almost entirely by one guy named Christian Selig, and it's been the best way to use Reddit on a phone for something like six years. As of tomorrow it's gone, along with Reddit Is Fun on Android, which is shutting down the same day. I don't think I've felt this specifically sad about a piece of software closing since Google Reader, and I know how that sounds.
Quick recap for anyone who missed the last month and a half of this: back in April, Reddit announced it was going to start charging for API access, the thing third-party apps use to actually talk to Reddit and pull posts and comments. That part isn't unreasonable on its face, companies charge for API access all the time. The problem is the price. Selig did the math on what it would cost to keep running Apollo under the new pricing and landed somewhere around twenty million dollars a year, which is obviously not a number an app that costs a few bucks a month can absorb. He posted his breakdown, people were furious, and it snowballed into that whole blackout thing two and a half weeks ago where thousands of subreddits went private for 48 hours. Some of the big ones never really came back to normal, either, a bunch are still doing weird protest stuff, only NSFW content or nothing but John Oliver pictures, that kind of thing.
I've used Apollo since basically the week it launched. I don't even remember what I used before it, probably the official app back when it was still called "Reddit is Fun for Android's iOS cousin" or whatever, and honestly the official Reddit app has never been good. It's slow, it's got ads shoved in weird places, and every redesign somehow makes browsing comments worse. Apollo just got out of your way. Custom swipe gestures, the little upvote counter that pulses when something crosses a threshold, the way you could set your own theme colors instead of being stuck with corporate red. Small stuff, but it added up to something that felt made by a person who actually used the app, not a committee.
What gets me is that this whole situation was avoidable. Reddit's CEO Steve Huffman gave interviews where he basically said third-party apps were freeloading and compared Apollo to Google or Microsoft training AI models on Reddit data for free, which is a genuinely bizarre comparison to make about a guy running a solo indie app that Reddit itself used to hold up as an example of a healthy developer ecosystem. Selig offered to pay something, just not a number that would bankrupt him personally (he mentioned Reddit initially quoted him a rate that would've meant paying about twenty times what Twitter charges per API call, for context). Neither side moved. Now here we are.
I don't think this kills Reddit, to be clear. Most people use the official app or the website and don't know or care that any of this happened. But it does feel like the end of something, this idea that a big platform's data being open enough for random developers to build genuinely better front ends on top of it was just a normal thing that could happen. Twitter did something similar back in the winter, killing free API access practically overnight and breaking a ton of bots and third-party clients in the process. Feels like a pattern. The platforms want everyone funneled through their own app, where they control the ads and the algorithm and what you see, and third-party clients were always going to be collateral damage once that became the priority.
Selig said he's proud of what he built and that he's taking some time off before figuring out what's next, which, fair. Six years is a long time to run something solo, deal with the support requests, keep up with iOS updates, and then watch it get killed by a pricing decision you had zero say in. I'm going to open Apollo one more time tonight before midnight, scroll around a bit, probably feel weirdly nostalgic about an app icon. Then tomorrow I'll be back on the regular Reddit app like everyone else, grumbling about it the whole time.