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.
Thank you for reminding me to review the app on Android, which seems to have a rating of 3.6.
Yeah I installed the official app because I have to use Reddit for political activism. The app sucks donkey balls. It’s genuinely confusing to try and navigate. It’s never clear where you are. The app SUCKS.
I socialize here now, I only go to Reddit if I have to.
I’ve found that Reddit’s website works on the Brave browser just fine due to its popup blocker blocking the “view this nonce in the app” popup. But, then you’re stuck posting through the mobile site, which, while fairly straightforward, also sucks.
app sucks donkey balls
Received and understood Rocinante. You get those comms checked out when you hit port.
I’m curious- what activism groups are you a part of that can’t be moved off of Reddit?
Well the group doesn’t organize through Reddit, but we interact with all the internet sites, because people are on the internet.
I’m an unofficial volunteer for The Center for Election Science and right now their big thing is helping people switch their elections to Approval Voting. So basically I just keep an eye out for conversations and posts where election or representation reform is relevant and join the discussion.
If you wanna win hearts and minds, you gotta show up where the people are.
That being said, I’m on Lemmy because FUCK REDDIT and monetizing social interactions is gross and icky.
Yeah I feel that. I make the same argument for being on Instagram still. When you’re trying to get your voice out, you gotta where it’ll be heard.
This approval voting concept is interesting- seems similar to ranked-choice in terms of getting a quality result, but a different take on how to get there.
Pretty much every alternative voting system gets very similar results in practice. Most of the arguments between voting nerds are about what kind of things are more important. Approval people favor simplicity and scalability, RCV people favor individual voter expression. I could give you all the arguments about why approval is better, but we’re in the middle of a funding drive so I’m kinda burnt out on it.
No worries- thanks for letting me know! I’ll look into it more on my own.
Why not use Re-Reddit instead of ad-ridden official app? It’s by the Revanced team and has no ads. I don’t know if it also tracks like the official app.
Does it have a way to bypass the API problem that’s about to hit us? I don’t browse or anything anymore, I just show up in places where I’m told people have questions I’d be good at answering.
We will find that out on 1st July I guess.
Unless Reddit management has grown a collective brain then the only apps that are exceptions for are the ones for blind users, because otherwise they’d get sued under the ADA laws.
Although frankly they could get sued anyway, because the existence of a third party solution isn’t really a defense.
Weird, it shows as 4.4 in my store.
Apparently the ratings are location specific
Its 3.6 stars for me on android in the US.
Same for me.
I see 3.6, too.
As I’ve seen in other posts of this nature, I believe it’s based on locale and possibly platform.
Maybe, it sucks because this is a very high rate for such a shitty app.
3.4 on the Canadian play store.
It doesn’t let me review or rate it… Fucking bullshit
If you have it installed and still can’t find the place to rate it, (took me a couple minutes myself) search it on the play store and then tap on the logo or the words to the left of where it says “open” and you should find a spot to rate it on the new page.
Might need to install it first.
Reddit on the Google Play Store still has 4.5 stars. We gotta fix that.
3.6 stars now…
3.0 in europe. I did my part a week ago. Glad to see it working.
It’s 3.6 in the UK still.
Seems to have been stable at 3.6 for the past few hours. Have to remember to check back after July 1st to see how bad it gets (hopefully)
Quite a lot of people probably haven’t actually used it yet.
But after July 1st people may actually genuinely be reviewing it which will be a fun experience for them I’m sure.
It is somehow worse then new Reddit on the web.
I did my part
I’m doing my part!
I went to do my part, but forgot I already gave the app a 1 star rating 5 years ago. It’s always been a piece of crap.
Did my part, it’s at 3.4 now
I did my part! 3.6 as of now.
Heading over there now.
That won’t do!
It still shows as 4.8 interest Apple IOS store, with a proud “editor’s choice” mark on it.
I did my part and left a 1-star rating and correlating review.
Apple removes all legitimate reviews, Google is the only one that allows it but removes it a few days later. None of these stores show real reviews for new people.
You’re right.
This is yet another reason we need decentralized options. All these giant companies protecting their walled gardens only hurts users.
In slight fairness to Google it’s very easy to sideload apps. And you can install 3rd party app stores very easily too.
As a heads up, apparently the people who manage revanced (the app you can use to repackage YouTube to bypass ads) have added a repack for reddit sync, letting you use your own API key in place of the devs. I’m still waiting on my dev key but that’s something that might interest people.
While I appreciate people putting effort to make it work, fuck the leadership and fuck the platform. They don’t deserve our business, full stop.
Fully agreed.
Also, while using one’s own dev key is a nice workaround, it’s disappointing to hear that jerome is having to ‘wait’ for their dev key. I’ve used other apps (eg, GitHub) where I can create an API key within moments.
That’s because Reddit is crap and can’t do anything properly
Notably, using a personal API key like that is against the terms of service and may get your account banned. Not that it bothers me though, I’m essentially on Lemmy full-time now.
Which doesn’t make any sense if their motives were truly reducing API calls. It is pretty clear that they wanted to kill the 3rd party apps.
Oh absolutely, at this point their intentions are clear. If all they want is their damn IPO, I say let them have it. I personally will try to contribute to and grow the content here.
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.
Never mind zero stars, the Reddit app (and new Reddit in general) deserves negative stars.
Thankfully there is plenty of innovation in the market for fediverse apps.
@thehatfox I’d love to see a -1 star to signify willful ignorance, deliberate sabotage, complete dumbassery, or all of the above.
The first ➖⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review ever! You did it, Reddit!
We want them to feel a sense of pride and accomplishment!
It’s sad that Reddit is dying, but in a way I’m happy to be free of it. It is an addicting but ultimately vapid way to spend your time, and the amount of spam and reposts was making it a dumpster fire long before this API fuckery. Long live the Fediverse!
Something I’ve only noticed while migrating over to the Fediverse is how rampant Gifs/short videos à la TikTok and YouTube Shorts had become on Reddit. That was not the kind of content I originally used Reddit for but somehow I kept slogging through this shit on the daily.
Gonna miss the platform, but not the devs.
The platform is nothing without it’s users, and those will migrate elsewhere
I did my part.
would you like to know more
Oh good reminder
I killed my Reddit app and account. Not looking back.
No wonder, Reddit sucks and the app is terrible.
Not wrong.
Part = Done
The rating will go down a lot more on July 1.
Seems unlikely. Currently it’s sitting at 4.8 stars in the Apple Store with millions of 5 star ratings. Makes you wonder if they’re cooking the books, as if Apple or someone on the Store team has VC money riding on this.
as if Apple or someone on the Store team has VC money riding on this.
They don’t have VC money riding on this. VCs aren’t offering the kind of money that Apple cares about, especially when the trade-off is getting caught ‘fixing’ the marketplace somehow.
But there doesn’t need to be dirty money in play - Apple has long been inclined to manipulate ratings in the App Store, and almost universally in ways that trend more positive. Even as a completely free app that generates no revenue for Apple, having it on the store and having it highly rated on the store makes the App Store look good. Apple wants there to be a positive impression of using their walled-garden app environment and highly-rated free apps for popular sites and services supports that. They can even argue that the ratings on their store prove that theirs is the better environment, because Reddit for iOs is rated better than Reddit for Android, and “they’re the same app!” so therefore it’s the platform that gets credit for the gap consumer perception.
More, Reddit needs to generate revenue, and lots of users are reaching the site from mobile. It makes sense to find ways of monetizing the app, especially if they can corner the market on it - and Apple gets a cut of all purchases made through their platform.
Did my bit but still 3.6 in UK Play Store 🤨
