What was so special about the Apollo app?
What was so special about the Apollo app?
I've seen the app Apollo as the center of the reddit protest (it was mentioned and cited more than any other app in relevant posts). I've also seen many Lemmy clients in development taking inspiration from it.
As a lifetime Android user I've never been able to use it, and I've never gotten a proper answer to "why not just use the official app?" What made it different from the official application and other unofficial clients that consequently made it so popular among Redditors?
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It just has so many unique features. Like sharing a comment or post as a screenshot including a customisable number of comments above it and the post itself. Very useful for quickly sharing or saving comment chains with context, without fiddling with collapsing comments and cropping. Or categories for your saved posts and comments so you could organise. A reminder function built into the app. A subreddit watcher that alerts you whenever certain keywords were posted in a sub. And many more. Lots of things that required more than just developing an app to access an API and display stuff. Gestures were the best I ever used. UI was clean and useful without fiddling with customisation. I was on Android until last year and tried many apps, Apollo beats them all.
But I think it was at the centre of attention because the developer is very responsive and Apollo is the app for Reddit on iOS. On Android you have users spread out across Sync, Boost, RiF, Joey and many more.
The official app is just featureless in comparison. I’m left-handed and you can’t even move the pictures of the posts to the left in compact view so I can access the picture/link/Video without reaching all the way across my phone. Might sound insignificant, but it’s something very simple that every Reddit app I used had and a deal breaker for me.