Apollo for Reddit

So this app is fantastic. I pay yearly for ultra as reddit is really the only social media site I'm on anymore outside of Mastodon. The experience on iPad and iPhone is absolutely flawless. Rarely is there a bug and when there is you can contact the dev through the app or through /r/apolloapp on reddit and he's very responsive and will attempt to work through the bug with you. This is the best spiritual successor to the previous top reddit app which was alien blue. That app was acquired by reddit to create their current app. The period between reddit's acquisition of alien blue and the release of Apollo were the dark times. There just weren't any great alternatives to alien blue, and I tried a ton of them. Now on to the criticisms, as I've gushed enough. Maybe about a year or two ago, the experience on my M1 Macbook Pro was fantastic! No real complaints. An update completely ruined scolling though. Whereas most Mac apps allow for scrolling that's very fluid and literally slides the page up and down and will continue that movement when there's some momentum to the scoll, Apollo somehow removed this very fluid scrolling. Now it doesn't detect and momentum and the page instantly stops scrolling as soon as your finger leaves the trackpad. If the dev could fix that it would be a pretty good experience on my M1 mac. I luckily don't have the issues that other reviewers stated they experience with their M* Macbooks. Long story short, buy apollo app! It's worth the price of admission. If you're on a Macbook M* device, probably still get it but be aware that it may not work as perfectly as it does on your iPhone or iPad.

Apollo has so many more features and options compared to Reddit’s app. Options to use a dedicated search bar from within the hidden posts section as well as from within my saved content for that one particular thing I’d want to share later make saving so much more meaningful. Combine those features with the ability to customize short swipe and long swipe gestures, and I get a much more seamless browsing experience than anything the original app currently has to offer. I can engage with a post and comment thread so much faster and just as quickly scroll through to the next post that catches my eye. And when I come back to the app, because I can easily swipe to hide previously seen posts, my feed is never cluttered with content that I’ve already interacted with. Stellar developer communication and constant app updates is the icing on top. About every couple of months a new feature, quality of life update, new app theme, or community-made app icon pack comes out. I love that I have variety even in something small like the app icon just to keep things looking fresh even before opening the app. And if the community has a request, the developer is quick to respond.

Such a great little app. Personally I was fine with the original mobile Reddit and still am but after hearing a friend suggest bacon reader, I was interested because you don’t often come across clients for apps. Especially apps that are extremely customizable and work great like the Reddit app. After some research, however, I found Apollo. You may think that the paywall for premium is excessive but it really isn’t needed and only really adds some extra customizability and the fact that you can pay what you want for premium ($2-10 USD) makes it worth it for me. You can browse faster and comments are so much easier to read. The thing that impressed me the most were the simple things like swiping to upvote, save, or reply. Having the upvote button on the right, being able to save GIFs, having volume in the top left (I know it’s coming in iOS 13 but it’s still neat) and the fact that these features are free makes the app perfect. Personally I don’t post a lot but to me, it seems that the developers spent a lot of time making sure posting was much more intuitive because of the tools the app includes. (almost as good as many pc editing softwares). In addition I experienced faster load times for images and video(GIFs were lacking a little) but in general the app was way smoother and cleaner than the regular app. I really love the app and I don’t think I can go back. The only thing I would change is to add the scheduled light and dark mode to the free version because this feature is included in the original Reddit app.