Reddit is here: Apollo, Sync, and BaconReader gone dark

After a month of outrage, protests, and upheaval from the community, Reddit finally changed the switch to shut down some third-party apps.

Apollo, an iOS app that became a rallying point for recent protests against Reddit’s impending API pricing, is no longer uploading any content from the platform. When I open it, all I see is a spinning wheel. Developer Christian Selig assured me that Reddit was the one turning things off, not him: “It was nice to be given time,” he said in an email to the edge.

BaconReader, another popular application, returns an error message for me: “Request failed: client error (429).” When I click on the “Click to Refresh” link, I get the same error message.

Sync, an Android app, also stopped working, displaying this message: “Error loading page: 401.” We also found a tweet that appears mistake And Lemmy comments about the lack of jobs On the fourth app, reddit is fun (RIF), but at the time we published this article, one edge The employee can still view the content on the app when not logged in. However, he was unable to log into his account.

Users were so angry at the company’s treatment of Selig and developers of some other popular third-party apps that they staged protests to try to get Reddit to back down. But despite the over 8,000 community being darkened, Reddit has stuck its ground, and now some apps are officially darkened. (Not every app will be shut down: Narwhal, Relay, and Now will still be available, though they will eventually become subscription-only.)

Reached for comment, Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt referred to the company Fact sheet about their API changeswhich was just updated on Friday, as well as a Friday night post from an official Reddit confirming the new API rate limits It will be enforced soon. (According to the fact sheet, the price caps were technically supposed to go into effect on July 1st. I’m not sure what time zone Reddit was measuring this in, but if we’re basing it on US time zones, that means that Reddit decided to enforce Boundaries a few hours before the time she said she would.)

This week, I asked Selig if he plans to continue using Reddit after Apollo shuts down. “Honestly, I’m not sure,” he said. “I definitely use it a lot.”