iOS Reddit App Apollo's Developer Surprised by WWDC Callout

https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/141kfmi/wwdc_2023_event_megathread/

by doctoboggan • 3 years ago

133 27 3 years ago

old.reddit.com

Ch4otic• 3 years ago

Permalink to the comment for those interested: https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/141kfmi/wwdc_2023_ev...

Can someone explain for those of us who don't know? The comment links to this image right now https://imgur.com/6liBpal and I see Disney+ and then some streaming media phone app.

jjcm• 3 years ago

This was a picture taken by Apollo's developer, Christian Selig. It's just him showing he was there in person. While he got an invite to watch the event at Apple's campus, he was surprised by the shout out.

For more context, with Reddit's API licensing fees, his app will go defunct should they continue forward.

ozten• 3 years ago

Apollo App is a popular UI for Reddit because their App and website are famously terrible (and Apollo is slick and awesome).

Reddit told Apollo dev they would soon be charged $20 million per year.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36142285

So various Reddit communities will go dark for 48 hours to boycott / protest

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36196343

coolandsmartrr• 3 years ago

Hi @dang, you may want to replace this submission's link to this

tmpz22• 3 years ago

What was the callout exactly? Was it a presentation where they showed the logo or interface - or did they directly call it out by name?

Either way its awesome

lotsofpulp• 3 years ago

I think it was Craig that specifically pointed it out in his iPad Widgets or something.

futhey• 3 years ago

When showcasing macOS widgets (46:18) Craig mentioned he could now add his favorite iOS widgets to the macOS desktop, including "Apollo for Reddit"...

dbg31415• 3 years ago

For another week or two anyway.

gerogerke• 3 years ago

Here's a direct link: https://www.youtube.com/live/GYkq9Rgoj8E?feature=share&t=279...

wilg2• 3 years ago

Very nice if they did this as a supportive gesture. Apollo is great, and the kind of thing Apple needs to encourage on the app store.

Unfortunately, Apple has a huge problem where the only developers that really "get" making great iOS apps are independent people or small teams. Every other major app is some kind of weird amalgamation of half-busted UX concepts from various platforms, probably because there's no good way to offer a service with a mobile app without having to design and engineer for the least-common-denominator.

I'll also add that Apple's own iOS apps are often much worse than the third-party competitors in the space in terms of design and functionality, and update on a glacial yearly cycle, but have deeper platform integration than most developers can muster.

Rebelgecko• 3 years ago

Very nice if they did this as a supportive gesture

The whole reddit API kerfuffle happened like 4 days ago. I think the presentations were recorded well before then- FWIW Kojima was in Cupertino 2 weeks ago

whazor• 3 years ago

Switch the app icon in post?

derefr3• 3 years ago

probably because there's no good way to offer a service with a mobile app without having to design and engineer for the least-common-denominator.

Isn't the "good way", just to not treat "mobile" as a monolith, and instead have a separate team, with separate competencies, develop a separate app for each platform, such that each app can take advantage of all the strengths of each platform?

Back in the early console-game times, if you had made an arcade game, you'd have one company, who knew Nintendo programming really well, do your Nintendo port; and another company, who knew DOS PC programming really well, do your DOS PC port; and so forth.

Why did we stop doing that? Companies had enough money to do it back then. And the same companies are 100x richer now. They can totally afford a development team per platform, targeting that platform natively.

aikinai• 3 years ago

Because more frameworks and abstraction make it feasible to not do that.

I absolutely agree with you and wish companies cared enough about the quality of their experiences, but it’s not economically required so most companies naturally won’t do it.

dathinab3• 3 years ago

Why did we stop doing that?

cost and hard to measure returns (i.e. the cost of not doing so doesn't clearly show up anywhere)

building two apps can easily be twice the frontend dev (and worse maintenance) cost and a higher backend dev cost too (but not twice).

Theoretically with the right abstraction and flexibility wrt. to how UI components get data you can have less the twice the cost. But getting that right is hard and needs somone who knows what they are doing forcing that decision and having the time/will to setup the skeletons rightly and educate how to keep things "the right way" to not fall out this sync pattern etc.

Practically this tends to not be viable in bigger orgs (they don't want to take the risk of the expert getting it wrong) and bigger teams (they tend to have very mixed skill levels and things will get bad at some point leading to increasing dev cost approaching 2x if not some costly refactoring is done in time).

That a lot of teaching in the App dev scene seems to be more like "here how you do it the Apple way it's the only right way", "here how you do it the Android way it's the only right way" instead of "here are the concepts, this is how they apply with Android, this is how they apply with Apple etc." probably doesn't help either. I know it's a stereo type but I have just meet way to many app devs which do not understand the underlying concepts of both the framework they use and the language and don't realize it. (I also have meet the opposite, so maybe saying there are a lot of bad devs out there is more appropriate.).

EDIT: I nearly forgot: That you have to use not just different frameworks but different languages per platform to do it "fully right" succs bad, like really bad.

wilg2• 3 years ago

There's also a product reason – now you have to explain two different UIs to people, support them, etc.

bloppe2• 3 years ago

If they did it as a supportive gesture, the irony would not be lost on me. Apple notoriously despises 3rd party clients. They don't even have a web client for iMessage.

dathinab3• 3 years ago

Idk. about the Apple eco system but this always had been strange for me.

But on Android there are very clear easy to understand and explained rules about how to do material design, but somehow basically no app (including most ones from google) get it right.

My guess for the Android ecosystem is (at least theoretical) unnecessary programmatic complexity when implementing the "how", but then I'm not an App developer so idk.

danloughney• 3 years ago

Apollo has received subtle call-outs before. I've seen the app icon in the montages before. Not sure how many times.

iOS Reddit App Apollo's Developer Surprised by WWDC Callout

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