After a month of outrage, protests, and community unrest, Reddit has finally flipped the switch to shut down a number of third-party apps.
Apollo, an iOS app that became a rallying point for the recent protests against Reddit’s upcoming API pricing, is no longer loading content from the platform. When I open it, all I see is a spinning wheel. Developer Christian Selig confirmed to me that Reddit is the one who turned things off, not him: “would have been nice to have been given a time,” he says in an email to The edge.
BaconReader, another popular app, shows me an error message: “Request failed: client error (429).” When I tap the “Tap to Refresh” link, I get the same error.
Sync, an Android app, has also stopped working and displays this message: “Error loading page: 401.” We also found a tweet an error And Lemmy makes comments about lack of functionality in a fourth app reddit is nice (RIF), but at the time of publishing this article, one Forget employee could still see content on the app if not logged in. However, he could not log into his account.
Users were outraged by the company’s treatment of Selig and the developers of some other popular third-party apps, who staged protests to try to get Reddit to work. But despite over 8,000 communities being wrong-footed, Reddit held its own, and now some apps are officially kaput. (Not every app is going away: Narwhal, Relay, and Now will still be available, though they’ll eventually become subscription-only.)
When reached for comment, Reddit spokesman Tim Rathschmidt pointed to the company’s factsheet on the API changeswhich was just updated on Friday, as well as a Friday night post from a Reddit admin confirming that the new API speed limits would be enforced “soon”. (According to the factsheet, the rate limits were technically going to go into effect on July 1. I’m not sure what time zone Reddit was measuring that in, but if we’re basing it on US time zones, that means Reddit decided a few hours before it promised maintain the limits.)
This week I asked Selig if he plans to still use Reddit after Apollo shuts down. “Honestly, not sure,” he said. “I’m definitely using it a lot less.”
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