On a whim I decided to give the official app a try because a lot of people will be forced to use it, if they decide to stay on Reddit.
Holy hell, it’s just slow. Can’t scroll through a subreddit without annoying hitches and stutters. Comments aren’t any better also.
On the other hand, Sync is just fucking gorgeous and runs immensely better than the encumbered official app.
How can apps made by small teams or even a single person be better optimized than one supposedly made by a larger team with a larger development budget?
It’s genuinely infuriating that with 2000 employees Reddit couldn’t be bothered to put together a halfway decent app. Apollo was created by a single developer.
What makes it worse is they killed off a perfectly good TPA (alien blue) for the dev to help create their app. Which is one of the worst apps I’ve seen, using Reddit as a web wrap is better than the app.
Thing is, they don’t have to do that. They can just wall the garden instead, and then anyone that wants to use Reddit will be forced to either use their garbage or just stay off reddit.
It doesn’t seem to be working out so well for them, but that was in fact one of several potential solutions to this problem. Why do any work, when you can just bully the alternatives into submission?
What’s even worse is Reddit bought a third party app (Alien Blue) to use as the base for their first party app. They couldn’t even be bothered to create something original and instead just ruined the most popular app out there.
It actually wasn’t terrible right after their acquisition, it really got bad once they made the video player changes to make it more like TikTok/Instagram/Facebook in an effort to grow “engagement” so they could sell more ads. I stopped using it at about that time and moved to Apollo and never looked back. Trying it again a month or two ago (to access my chat messages since that isn’t an endpoint exposed in the API) and it was just so much worse. With Pi-hole it’s maybe usable but it isn’t fun or pleasant compared to Apollo.
I figure most people don’t know that there are apps that have minor but key usability enhancements and so don’t really care. Those same people though are fine with the ads and taking on Facebook and Instagram and so are pretty much a lost cause anyways.