Given the strong genetic link between wefwef and Apollo, I think it would be great to acknowledge and describe the origins of wefwef’s UX design. In a few months, there will (hopefully) be new signups who never used Reddit, and never had the opportunity to use the awesome piece of software Christian developed over the better part of a decade. I’d like to see the legacy and history of Apollo live on, even if it’s just that iconic icon and a few sentences.
Maybe we could have an “Ode to Apollo” somewhere under the settings menu?
Unpopular opinion: I feel like Apollo started getting worse once the Pixel Pals were added.
They were cute, for sure, and I understand why he did it, but I noticed a lot more weird bugs that made the app basically unusable some days, and it ended up driving me to another third party app.
I never enabled them, so I never really noticed. I didn’t feel like the app got noticeably worse. If anything, I got more comfortable with Apollo year after year and the old desktop site I was so familiar with was becoming less appealing over time.
I do understand how, after maintaining the same app as his main gig, he would want to work on something else after almost a decade - especially something with mainstream appeal. There are young folks in my family who got Pixel Pals (the standalone app) after seeing their friends have them. That’s huge.
I hope he does come back eventually to make some Fediverse stuff.
Wasn’t the source of a lot of it the random undocumented changes Reddit kept making to their api? That’s my recollection of the various video and gifv bugs at least. Those were the only ones that were super annoying to me anyway.
My only disappointment from Christian is waiting for years for the mythical iPad update. :(
Not sure, but the thing that made me quit Apollo was that I was one of the people who got the pop-up about the Ultra lifetime sale every five minutes when scrolling through the feed last Christmas. It made the app completely unusable.
Every time I tried to report any bug, even if it was a trivial one like glitchy formatting, I just got called a ton of colorful names by the community. The fact that this was allowed was my main gripe.