Skip Navigation
Christian squeezing Apollo for its last bit of money
  • This will be the last reply i make towards this topic, as I am kinda getting tired of it

    1. Yes he did apologize, but he then did it again. And again. His apology was seen as disingenuous by the community. Especially since early on he was claiming it was a bug but then not fixing it for some reason. Apologizing doesn’t discount the fact that it kept happening. I’m not sure if he even disabled it after he apologized or not, my memory is not too good on that.

    2. That was not my intention. I was stating that he used sales as a way to increase the price. He did this frequently with lifetime (originally only $20, became $50 by the end)

    3. The problem was that his blacklist tweak list included more than just those piracy tweaks. He should’ve done more research before completely locking people out of their subscription. Not a big deal though, since apparently it was also easily bypassed.

  • Christian squeezing Apollo for its last bit of money
  • Pop ups to paid users: https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/z83qh4/im_an_early_supporter_and_paid_for_pro_ive_had https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12hcrdw/ultra_spamming etc

    Disabling paid access to Jailbreak users: https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/hpyybw/any_way_to_know_what_tweak_is_causing_this_i (it was originally meant to stop pirates but the tweak list included more than just piracy tweaks)

    https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/z75s9r/last_chance_for_black_fridaycyber_monday_sale_on Black Friday pop ups as well as locking new features to Ultra subscription (originally meant for things that require a server only)

    https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/z4l0v5/apollo_for_reddit_and_pixel_pals_black_friday increasing prices disguised as a sale

    Checking r/ApolloApp can find many more examples of everything I have talked about.

    I’m a long time Apollo users, so I took for granted that not everyone is aware or remembers these events

  • Christian regarding Apollo for Lemmy and open-sourcing Apollo
  • It’s not really that weird to see the plushie pop up, and then decide to view his recent posts / comments. Not sure how this post or the voyager post can be considered “attacks” either. I’ll provide some proof towards what I said in the other post in a bit.

  • Christian squeezing Apollo for its last bit of money
  • I covered much more than just the lifetime refunds, but do you really believe that there was no way for Christian to refund people who bought lifetime before all the API stuff? Someone could’ve seen Christian reassuring that API is not an issue, buy lifetime, and basically get screwed over. The plushie is a last straw sort of deal. He wants to completely move on from Apollo, unless there’s a chance he can make some more money from it. Not sure how you call selling a plushie of your logo posthumously “reminiscing on good times” while already selling them on wallpapers and convincing them to decline their prorated refunds.

  • Christian's first reaction to Voyager
  • Design wise yes it is a one to one copy, but Voyager was built from the ground up as a web app, which is completely different to Apollo’s “native Apple app” philosophy. So while it may seem at first “changed very little,” it is actually very different. He also isn’t interested in making his own “Apollo for Lemmy” so I think it’s fair to pass the torch down.

  • Christian's first reaction to Voyager

    This is from a couple of months ago but it came up after my previous post. It does seem like he doesn’t really like Voyager, but oh well.

    19
    Christian squeezing Apollo for its last bit of money
  • I’m not sure what Phantasy Star Online is, but yes it is because he is releasing merch for his defunct app months after the fact while also being radio silence towards the Apollo community. Christian says he wants to move on, but I guess that doesn’t apply to money making ventures.

    I’m also more critical on this because of his previous more greedy behavior, which I outlined in my main post as well.

  • Christian regarding Apollo for Lemmy and open-sourcing Apollo

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

    There are other reddit “competitors” out there, but Lemmy/Kbin is the main one, so I wonder why he didn’t name drop it. It’s odd that he chooses to not pursue this or atleast make it easier for the community, considering he is very active on Mastodon. Perhaps he doesn’t see monetary value in creating Apollo for Lemmy since he already made millions off of Apollo and currently with Pixel Pals

    https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/182v1it/_/kam3jaf/?context=1 Christian’s thoughts on open-sourcing Apollo (Not happening). Would’ve made it a whole lot easier to port Apollo to Lemmy, but we have many great alternatives now, so not a huge issue. Still, would’ve been useful for a lot of developers to see how he implemented some features.

    13
    Christian squeezing Apollo for its last bit of money
  • Yes, Reddit is all just user content, so I do not feel too bad for them, however it is true that Reddit’s free service in the form of their API made Christian potentially millions. However I do feel like there was a better compromise rather than what ended up happening.

  • Christian squeezing Apollo for its last bit of money
  • It’s not inherently unethical to sell merch. It’s however apparent to me that this seems to be a cash grab. The app died months ago. This is further apparent to me when acknowledging the greediness Christian has shown before. It is unethical to try and use your already dead app to try and gain even more money by selling a low-effort plushie.

  • [Crosspost] Christian’s Apollo Plushie

    I went into more detail on why i don’t like this cash grab in the other post

    0
    Christian squeezing Apollo for its last bit of money

    Christian has decided to squeeze Apollo again for more money, besides the wallpapers and asking people to decline their prorated refund. Christian additionally forced a pop up ad advertising this plushie.

    This is just exposing to more people the greediness that Christian has tapped into recently. Recall that previously, Christian forced daily pop up ads to paid pro users to get them to subscribe to ultra, which was originally stated to only be for notifications since it required a server, but now had all new features attached to it, even very simple local features. Reddit did him dirty, but to be honest, he may have had it coming. He previously disabled ultra access to Jailbroken devices as well, even if they were valid paid users. Christian also didn’t provide refunds to lifetime users who bought it before all the API stuff. Speaking of that, does anyone remember how instead of stating the price was increasing (which happened all the time) he instead said it was “going on sale at the old price”? Kinda misleading.

    61
    Alternate Steam Deck Community
    reddthat.com Steam Deck - Reddthat

    A place to discuss and support all things Steam Deck. Replacement for r/steamdeck_linux. As Lemmy doesn’t have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg: [Flair] My post title The following is a list of suggested flairs: [Discussion] - General discussion....

    Steam Deck - Reddthat

    It’s more active than this one, so you might want to also subscribe there

    0
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)UG
    UgandaSans @reddthat.com
    Posts 6
    Comments 35