Christian Selig, the developer and founder of Apollo, one of the biggest third-party Reddit apps with more than 1.5 million monthly active users, has announced that he will be shutting down the app for good at the end of June. The decision comes just days after the announcement that Reddit will be changing the way they charge for API access.
According to Selig, it will cost him more than $20 million in fees per year to continue running the app, which isn’t financially sustainable.
In a lengthy Reddit post, he discussed how he came to the decision and how the communication between him and Reddit broke down. He also expressed how Reddit “has deteriorated to an ugly point”, a point which many online users agreed with. He also revealed that he had asked Reddit to push back the July 1 start date, which is when the company will begin to charge third-party app developers access to its API but had not received a reply.
Following the post, hundreds of subreddits across the site announced that they will be going dark for 48 hours between June 12-14th in protest of the new API changes. Many moderators, essentially volunteers, have also stated that they may leave their subreddits or the site indefinitely.
While the API changes only affect the mobile side of Reddit, it is a huge deal for many as many third-party apps such as Apollo have customized tools that make it easy for moderators to do their tasks. With Apollo shutting down, many will be left without these essential tools.
In addition to Apollo, several other third-party Reddit apps will be shutting down at the end of the month. The list includes rif (previously known as Reddit is Fun), Sync, and ReddPlanet. The developer of rif wrote in a Reddit post that he came to the decision after realizing that Reddit has “shown a consistent unwillingness to compromise”.
Interestingly enough, Reddit has declined to comment on the matter. However, they did host an AMA with CEO Huffman on Friday about the latest changes to the API and third-party mod tools.
Despite the backlash, however, Huffman does not seem concerned about the fallout from the new changes, nor does he intend to reconsider or delay the decision. He also noted in the AMA that access to mature content will be limited via its API as of July 5th.
Since the API changes were announced, a new subreddit r/Save3rdPartyApps has sprung up and it has already attracted more than 50,000 members.
