I’ve seen the app Apollo as the center of the reddit protest (it was mentioned and cited more than any other app in relevant posts). I’ve also seen many Lemmy clients in development taking inspiration from it.

As a lifetime Android user I’ve never been able to use it, and I’ve never gotten a proper answer to “why not just use the official app?” What made it different from the official application and other unofficial clients that consequently made it so popular among Redditors?

  • lelelelelele@feddit.de
    1·
    1 year ago

    It just has so many unique features. Like sharing a comment or post as a screenshot including a customisable number of comments above it and the post itself. Very useful for quickly sharing or saving comment chains with context, without fiddling with collapsing comments and cropping. Or categories for your saved posts and comments so you could organise. A reminder function built into the app. A subreddit watcher that alerts you whenever certain keywords were posted in a sub. And many more. Lots of things that required more than just developing an app to access an API and display stuff. Gestures were the best I ever used. UI was clean and useful without fiddling with customisation. I was on Android until last year and tried many apps, Apollo beats them all.

    But I think it was at the centre of attention because the developer is very responsive and Apollo is the app for Reddit on iOS. On Android you have users spread out across Sync, Boost, RiF, Joey and many more.

    The official app is just featureless in comparison. I’m left-handed and you can’t even move the pictures of the posts to the left in compact view so I can access the picture/link/Video without reaching all the way across my phone. Might sound insignificant, but it’s something very simple that every Reddit app I used had and a deal breaker for me.

  • CleffyHeft@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 year ago

    Its got a sleek and easy to use UI, is jam packed with features like customisable gestures, no ads, a great media player and (I think) lots of accessibility features.

    It’s also wonderful that the dev loved his app and continually updated it

  • NickDangerThirdEye@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 year ago

    I know your asking about Apollo but I’m going to be the idiot who chimes in even though I used Reddit is fun. I used RiF because the native app was annoying and slow, I also didn’t want to see full screen images as I scrolled. RiF would give me a clean list of the topics from my favorite subs but not load full screen images so I could scroll through faster looking for the subjects I wanted to read/see at that moment. I just felt like I could find more of the topics I wanted faster than with the native app which also didn’t exist when I started using RiF. I’m using liftoff now and I’m annoyed at the images loading but I imagine there will be something that’s “cleaner” (by my standard) or a way to customize liftoff.

  • jarvis2323@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 year ago

    Good news. You can instal Wefwef and get the Apollo experience on android now. Give it a try and see how awesome it’s been for us iOS users

    • incognito_15@lemmy.world
      0·
      1 year ago

      I can’t seem to find wefwef in the play store. Is it there or does one need to side load it.

      I’m dumb. You gotta go to the GitHub and go to the app in the web https://wefwef.app and “install” it.

      It seems to think my account on Lemmy.world doesn’t exist and won’t load posts.