Just going off of a quick stroll through the iOS app store (as of time of this post)
Apollo is the highest rated 3rd party reddit app at #11 in the News category (for comparison, the next highest was Narwhal at #75 within this same category)
Apollo does not however breach the top 200 apps app-store-wide. The official reddit app does at #52 overall. and enjoys the company of other ubiquitous apps like Hulu, Duolingo, Google Drive, and Disney+, all within 10 ranks of it on the overall list.
It does seem that reddit has crunched their numbers and gambled that 3rd party app users and the uproar they are in is a calculable loss against the groundswell of desktop and official reddit app users.
The one issue with social networks isn’t necessarily the raw numbers, but rather what apps to your critical users use? We already know tons of subreddit mods use 3rd party apps for better tools. Power users – often those more likely to generate content – are also more likely to use third party tools. General consumers are more likely to use the first-party tool. What happens if there’s a dramatic drop in content generation, or subreddits get overrun with spam? The relationship is often complex because the user base isn’t homogeneous.
That said, as I get older I realize more and more that just because someone is running a company, it doesn’t mean they have any actual qualifications to be there. And this might just be a really surface-level evaluation and understanding on behalf of Reddit.
Just going off of a quick stroll through the iOS app store (as of time of this post)
The one issue with social networks isn’t necessarily the raw numbers, but rather what apps to your critical users use? We already know tons of subreddit mods use 3rd party apps for better tools. Power users – often those more likely to generate content – are also more likely to use third party tools. General consumers are more likely to use the first-party tool. What happens if there’s a dramatic drop in content generation, or subreddits get overrun with spam? The relationship is often complex because the user base isn’t homogeneous.
That said, as I get older I realize more and more that just because someone is running a company, it doesn’t mean they have any actual qualifications to be there. And this might just be a really surface-level evaluation and understanding on behalf of Reddit.