One of the remaining 3rd party Reddit apps (Relay) has begun discussing what it would be charging for subscription fees. Imo, they actually seem somewhat reasonable. The weird thing is that every upvote or downvote is an API call so you can rack up a huge number of API calls from voting.
Also, while the costs might be reasonable now, there’s nothing preventing Reddit from jacking up prices again.
Edit: Also, there wouldn’t be any NSFW content with the app.
That does seem reasonable.
Makes me curious, did Reddit finally budge on the pricing or did this dev figure out a way to optimize calls? Latter seems unlikely given each vote is a call.
I do remember people saying that Apollo was badly optimized for API calls.
I always felt like there has been some backroom negotiations between Relay and Reddit because Relay has (allegedly) been eating the costs of the API calls. Doesn’t seem like it would be cheap for the dev to just eat that cost.
“Those people” were Spez and admins, who have a vested interest in actively attacking Apollo, and then ran an entire smear campaign trying to accuse Christian of blackmailing reddit when just calling his app bad wasn’t enough. Nobody else ever corroborated those baseless claims made using unlabeled bar graphs. That info has exactly zero credibility, please do not repeat it.
The reality is, users that care enough about their experience to use a 3rd party app simply use reddit more. And make more api calls for content.
That’s fine, just trying to figure out how Relay users are having much lower API calls. I guess people could just be using it less. But, the kind of people to post on the Relay subreddit seem like they’d use Reddit more.
As a long time relay user but not an Apollo user, my impression from reading all the drama of early June was Apollo had a lot more features than I had seen before, and that was what set it apart from other clients. More features means more API calls, generally.
As an example, I had relay poll for PM once an hour, but I remember seeing Apollo was doing it every few minutes or maybe alongside thread views so notifications were more immediate. The user experience would be better but at the expense of far more API hits.
Again, there’s no guarantee that the number of API calls reported by Reddit are even remotely accurate. I’m pretty sure apollo was the only one to release his own API call numbers unless I’m just being a retard and forgetting, so there’s nothing to compare anyone to.
If anything the offical Reddit app makes the most API calls out of any app with as many fucking ads it preloads 24/7.
How are you going to figure out when all you have to go on is speculation? We don’t know how many API calls Relay has in comparison with e.g. Apollo, and even if we did, wouldn’t a better app have more API calls anyway because it’s more fun to use and therefore being used longer and more often? I could make a Reddit app with very low API call numbers because I’d make it so bad that people close it after a minute ;-)
Christian seemed pretty confident Apollo was no less efficient than other apps in terms of API calls.
Relay is probably just hoping to capitalize on a market everyone else abandoned. When it fails, can’t they just declare the company as bankrupt and move on?