Despite site-stopping protests by mods and users, Reddit leadership chose to brute force its way through any reasonable way of continuing third-party app support. Instead, the company hopes its luxury-priced API will be its secret shortcut to an overvalued IPO. As a result, Reddit’s official iOS app is being torpedo’d in the App Store.
The final days of Apollo may be upon us, but the ramifications of Reddit’s disdain for its users are here to stay. Look no further than App Store reviews to see the results. As TechCrunch reports, data from Sensor Tower shows how Reddit is sealing its fate as a 1-star reviewed app.
The data shared with TechCrunch shows that nearly 91% of Reddit’s U.S. iOS reviews carried a 1-star rating during the initial phase of the protest between June 12–14, compared to about 53% in the previous two months until May.
There has been some ratings improvement lately as the 1-star reviews of the Reddit U.S. iOS app dropped to about 86% between June 15–26, Sensor Tower’s data shows.
That’s presumably because the App Store doesn’t offer 0-star ratings. It’s also telling that Reddit leadership thought nuking third-party apps made sense when its own app saw more than half of its reviews rank it as low as possible.
Reddit app reviews in the App Store have also become a place for users to voice their frustration with the self-sabotaging company.
The data shared by Sensor Tower also indicates the top three most mentioned terms in all of the Reddit U.S. iOS reviews included keywords “apollo”, “third party” and “3rd party,” suggesting users were bombing review ratings in light of the new API move.
Either users are pissed or they’re hosting a lot of birthday parties for the god of truth.
At any rate, there’s been virtually no good news on the Reddit front since the awesome Apollo client was forced to announce its end date. The best Reddit app is closing up shop on June 30 to avoid owing tens of millions of dollars to Reddit before ever seeing its own revenue.
Like I said in another thread, apple is removing poor reviews for them.
I think companies are so experienced with brigades like this (whether justified or not) when emotions are running high that we can always expect the mass low-star reviews to be removed. I think the 53% 1 star reviews in the two months prior is more telling for those who haven’t had the misfortune of installing the default app.
That true, but surely theres a way they could only target the most recent reviews? After all, you’d want to maintain the integrity of the original score prior to the brigade.
It looks as though they didn’t do that in this case. They removed nearly all the one star reviews. The score appears to be higher than before. That’s equally misleading.
Many many months ago I downloaded it, and I couldn’t even get it to connect to reddits servers, so I uninstalled it moved on with my life, I should have reviewed it.
Now it’ll look like I’m jumping on the bandwagon, I don’t want that. I want it known that the app, independent of any decision management are taking, is ready really crap.