- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Looks like theres a final surprise in the form of a song in Apollo now that it’s closed.
Can anyone identify the artist?
EDIT: someone managed to find it. From Christian’s YouTube page:
A fun parody of Sarah McLachlan’s I Will Remember You performed by the incredible Zoe Wynns
How about instead of wasting time circle jerking in your 10 minutes of fame, you dedicate a few hours to add Lemmy/kbin/mastodon/whatever support to Apollo and actually support your users?
Although wefwef pretty much completely fills the gap left by Apollo, it still annoys me to see the way this guy is handling this situation. Not only is he doing jack shit to support his loyal longtime users, he went through the effort of updating the app to beg people not to refund the subscription.
/end rant
Glad this is downvoted. It takes way more than a couple of hours to completely change your apps backend to read from a completely different website’s API. And that’s not even thinking of how complicated dealing with the fediverse is, dealing with multiple domains and logging in through multiple fediverses.
The guy doesn’t owe you anything. Please be quiet.
I recommended his app to people, I paid for the subscription, I left a positive review on the appstore. I was a loyal user for a long time.
In the end, he tried (and fortunately failed) to sell Apollo to reddit, then just killed the app when that didn’t work. If he did care about users (aka the people that made him a lot of money), he could’ve sold the app to someone willing to continue it, or at least released it as open source.
It’s not the end of the world, and he didn’t eat a newborn baby or anything like that, but I don’t think people should be patting this guy on the back for the way he handled this. He just took the money and ran, abandoning his customers in the process. That’s not the type of business I want to support.
Reality check: vast majority of the people don’t give a shit what you or I do.
I am a day 1 user, bought lifetime pro within the month, and lifetime ultra on launch. I recommended the app to people. And guess what? No one gives a shit about me nor my recommendations. They’ve got their use out of the app; they’re happy that they’ve got a better Reddit experience while they were able to use the app; and now that the app is no more, they can be their own grown ass adults and decide what to do about the situation.
The app is down, due to no fault of the developer, and that’s that. And no, the developer didn’t take your money and ran with it. He’s offering refund for the unused subscription portion which yields a net deficit of estimated 250K USD that he will have to pay back to Apple after Apple Pay’s out people who doesn’t opt out. Given the situation, do you have 250K USD liquid cash to pay Apple on a 30 days notice, or would you rather ask nicely for some to choose to opt out of the refund? Because if you don’t, then maybe you shouldn’t be whining about your $13/yr subscription that you’re getting your prorated refund by choosing to not opt out.
The “bad guy” of the story is Reddit’s management. Not even so much for their goal of killing third party apps — their platform, their rules, that’s why we’re no longer on their platforms, and no longer playing by their rules — but rather their approach to the problem every step of the way. They could’ve announced a longer run way — “Starting 2024/01/01…” would’ve gave Christian (and other app devs) ample time to pivot and update their subscription model to make it work; limiting the maximum number of users (a-la Twitter in mid 2010s), however bad, would’ve still allowed the app to continue to exist. Demanding $20M/year on a 30 days notice, slander the devs, and actively suppress the entire moderation and user community? Bold move Reddit, let’s see how this will play out in a couple of months. Third party apps are likely but the first casualties of their decisions to implement this change.