The two biggest issues I've heard brought up (other than the fact that apps like Apollo just work better than the official app and don't have ads) is that moderation tools are dependent upon third-party apps, and third-party apps are more accessible for people with disabilities than the official reddit app.
The moderation tools offered by Reddit don’t have support for accessibility. If you are in r/blind for example… How are you gonna moderate that? And for those who don’t need those tools, third party apps save them a lot of time since the official app is so bad for such things.
The third party apps supported two important functions that the official Reddit app sucks at:
1) Reading assistance for people with sight impairment. Reddit has granted a pass for some apps on this basis though.
2) Moderation and Modmail. For people on the move, or, for example, where you're in front of a business PC or laptop all day, with Web restrictions or personal use policies. The mobile apps were extremely useful for moderation.
I did use the Boost app, but have moved to the official Reddit one for mod work; it's buggy and prone to erroring when trying to complete an action so you have to keep repeating things to make them 'stick'.
This is why the mods are up in arms because it's hard work at the best of times.
I think from doing extremely light research, it seems pretty much _all_ the 3rd party apps are better for moderation than the default client. However it seems unanimously people tend to prefer to moderate on desktop.
Different strokes for different folks for sure, but I personally cannot stand the "official" app. It's popular for sure, but mainly because reddit is popular and most people simply opt for the "official" client by default. The one time I tried it I hated all the ads, the inability to follow comment chains properly, the sluggishness -- really, everything. Apollo was a GODSENT back when it was announced. And I'm not even talking about tasks you would do as a moderator. I do hope that they reverse their decision.
I'm an Apollo user and I'll be dramatically reducing my use of Reddit if and when the third party apps are killed. The official Reddit app is nearly unusable, with a remarkably poor UI and too many ads. It also doesn't offer the tools for subreddit moderators that third party apps do.
The hope is that, despite being a small percentage of total users, third party app users represent a large volume moderators and high value contributors. If that's the case, this change will hurt Reddit enough to potentially roll it back.
What will probably happen is Reddit will tell us all to pound sand and we'll find alternatives.
Except the official Reddit app makes it impossible for people with disabilities, or people that want a reasonably well moderated community, or people that just want a usable app.
Enthusiast community that makes up probably 80% of the content on Reddit are going to see other options if they can't use third party apps.
I mean would you continue to use the internet if you could only use AOL?
Anytime your community is dependent on staying on one centurally controlled for-profit app with no alternatives, it's doomed.
The main struggle with reddit apps are the lack of mod tools. Only Alien Blue and Apollo have a simple method for working a queue. I still prefer Alien Blue's tools in this respect, but a lot of content fails to load with it.
This is somewhat tangentially related to this whole reddit api ordeal, but can someone share why they think that official means of accessing content on reddit app?
For example, I’ve been using reddit ios app for a while and it’s fine for me, aside from ads and some weird a/b tests when “sort comments” dropdown changes its location. Just before Apollo shut down, I downloaded it to see why other people swear by it. Well, it’s relatively similar and it didn’t see anything that’d make it so much better than the official app.
I'm a Reddit Mod and no issues with their web and app. It's basically very hard to moderate with third party clients, so there is no choice but to use their official platforms.
I do care about the third party apps because they assist moderators in doing their job (which has been done for free as a service to Reddit). And more personally, they provide accessibility support lacking both in the Reddit website and app. I am not a mod, and will literally no longer be able to use Reddit as well as I have had over the last years. The third-party developers have provided Reddit with tremendous value which is now lost.
In a similar vein, I use Apollo for iOS[1] and it's also magnitudes better. The official reddit app is starting to catch up, but it's designed with advertisers in mind, whereas you can use a different app and pay for ads to go away, or use the old, web version with a blocker.
The Apollo app had much better performance than the official Reddit app. However, the design of the app was amateurish and hideous to look at. The official Reddit app is actually designed by designers and it shows.
I’m just one Apollo user, but I don’t plan to install the official app. It’s terrible and riddled with ads.
It’s the same reason I don’t use instagram—seeing an ad every two images bugs the crap out of me. The difference with Reddit is there was a nice third party option.
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