To each their own, but I find this decision really misguided.
It’s her money, not mine, so whatever, but l do not expect her to turn a profit in, rather the opposite.
In my view, the cross section of “IfR” users and people willing to subscribe monthly is rather small (especially if the money mostly goes to reddit - assuming I could afford it, I, for instance, would rather fund an open system like Lemmy).
And if Apollo’s dev Christian Selig decided that it wasn’t worth it with an already established paying user base, who already has a strong culture of subscriptions and exaggerated pricings, and one of the highest volume of users, at what probably was the peak usage of the platform; I don’t see how a small app like IfR can survive.
That, or Christian made a pretty expensive mistake…
I’m generally willing to pay for a service (I donate to Open Source Projects I regularly use) because of course there are server costs, development costs, etc. But in this case and after all that Reddit has done to its user base it would be a very bad signal to give them money for it… I like Infinity for reddit and would love to have an Infinity for Lemmy
The other point for me is that reddit has been getting shittier long before the API change. Forcing you to use their crappy app when you just clicked a link on mobile, all this weird avatar and award stuff. The weird chat that got bolted onto their message system, yet keeping the two seperate?
There’s no way I will pay for that.
Did you know, there’s actually 3? PM, Chat and Legacy Chat… whatever the heck differentiates the last two is frankly beyond me, a 12+ yrs old Reddit user…
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“It’s required for you to update Infinity after July 1st… Thank you for understanding!”
goes on Lemmy and never returns to Reddit lol
cross section of “IfR” users and people willing to subscribe monthly is rather small
Absolutely. I used Infinity for years now because it’s open source and on F-Droid. I used it to get away from Google and the Reddit App. Donating for Infinity’s developer? Sure thing. Paying money only to finance reddits API policy? For sure not.
I don’t think most users will understand where their money is actually going…
Which is going to be even better of an experience for IfR’s dev: “why is your app so expensive?”, “We pay SO MUCH and still have bugs…”, “Hey, with what I pay you, I sure would expect the feature I requested to be implemented already”. Oh boy, what fun. My only regret is that this probably isn’t going to be public, because I can definitely afford popcorn. 🙃
Someone should tell the developer to not do that. They should just shut down their app.
It’s ‘adapt or die’ at the moment for 3rd party Reddit apps. I was kind of hoping that the developer would pivot to Lemmy or add Lemmy functionality to the app. Infinity was my go-to app before the apocalypse.
Same, and that’s why I really am disappointed. But hey, someone else is apparently trying to make an “Infinity for Reddit” inspired app for Lemmy. It’s apparently going to be called “Beyond”. Hopefully, “Beyond for Lemmy”. 😉
I digg the name
I think they’re trying to get rid of rfd party apps. It’s more ‘die or die’ for them.
I personally wouldn’t try to work with Reddit, if I were a developer, but another factor here is that walking away from a project might be a big risk for someone who doesn’t have a backup plan. Christian Selig is a high-profile figure who can afford to walk away from a project. He will be able to rebuild his career quickly and easily, and he knows it. The developer of Infinity likely doesn’t have as many opportunities, and may also not feel comfortable taking that risk. I don’t know much about her, but if she’s not making a whole lot as is, she may legitimately not be able to afford going without an income source for weeks or months. It may be less about making a profit by doing this than about avoiding a catastrophic loss. Selig has admitted he’s going to be losing a six-figure amount of money ($250,000, iirc) from shutting down after selling year-long subscriptions. I suspect everyone who has or had a Reddit app looking for alternative income sources, but I don’t blame her for trying to make Infinity work for a little while longer.
I guess if the app is done and basically works then you might as well add a payment system and at least try to cut your losses. I’d struggle to enthusiastically improve the app after that though.
That comment about “it might not work” really sums up reddit’s attitude
I think “struggle to enthusiastically improve the app” is probably an understatement, lol. I doubt this is meant to be a long-term business strategy. It’s not like there were any good options here, just her choice of a few bad ones. I wish her luck.
I read the post that went into further detail and infinity’s creator was looking for intern/entry level software developer jobs… so definitely not on the same profile level unfortunately
Dang, that’s rough. Infinity should look good on her resume, at least.
Infinity is an awesome app. I’m suprised that she only thinks shes good enough for an intern/entry level software developer job
Agreed. I have never used Infinity myself, but I think anyone who can not only develop a functional app, but maintain that app over an extended period deserves better than an internship. But it’s an awkward position, and companies like to claim they won’t even interview you for a one-finger-typing job unless you have ten years of experience and an engineering degree. And from what I see in the news, tech companies are doing more layoffs than hiring right now.
That, or Christian made a pretty expensive mistake…
I wouldn’t put a lot pass /u/spez, including offering special deals on API pricing. Especially if he thinks it would make Christian Selig look bad.
It’s precisely the kind of thing a lying, gaslighting and vindictive /u/spez would do.
You know what… That does seem like something Spez would do.
It’s 100% clear that Reddit is trying to kill off third party apps completely so that they can facefuck you with ads and other garbage. The Apollo dev saw the writing on the wall. I can’t blame other app devs for trying to squeeze a bit more livelihood out of this, but hopefully they’ve realized that they need to move on asap. In the end, it’s a great reminder to not build your business on someone else’s platform, even if they’re “cool”.
I would consider paying, but giving money to support Reddit? With its current attitude? It is a moral choice rather than a financial one.
I think the best thing to do if you want to continue using Infinity would be to just compile your own APK with your own API key.
I’ve never used android studio before but didnt take me very long to work out how, and it all seems to be working.
You only need to change a couple of settings and about 3 lines of code.
You don’t even need android studio. You can edit the files with anything and just compile the apk with any valid android compiler. But yeah it ain’t that hard. The question remains: do you want to be using reddit? ;)
Someone made a Google collab notebook that takes your API keys as an input, takes care of the compilation and offers you a download link to get your apk. Zero knowledge needed!
I did try that method but for some reason it wouldn’t install. Seemed like it was conflicting with an already installed app (had already uninstalled it) so by using Android studio I could change the package name at the same time.
Also did see some people mention it might be a bad idea to give your API key out to randos on the internet which is fair enough.
Giving out such an API key is essentially what the infinity dev does, up until the 1st of July at least.
Reviewing the colab’s code, I did not find anything susceptible to leak your API key (or other info) to the author.
However, I have also seen users offering to build apks for others (which implies giving out API keys on top of installing software from a random guy). That seems indeed very dangerous.
Yea thats true, and tbf I did give them mine and i’ve not had my identity stolen as of yet lol.
The main reason I did mine manually was that I was getting a conflict error when installing so i wanted to change the package name too.
I ended up basicly using the Collab thing as a guide on what to change so it did come in handy.
How do we get an API key, does it cost money, and where can we find the notebook?
This is what I and many others used who have zero knowledge. It’s very simple. Check it out here In the Collab link it gives you the link to get the key.
You should never pay for for-profit social media, it’s fundamentally backwards. Their service is not the product, your contributions and presence are. They are nothing without you, and require you.
The exception is things like instances on the Fedi where it’s not for profit and you’re putting up a server to include yourself.
This is reddit killing third party apps, because even if you did subscribe you’re still not getting NSFW because reddit is taking that out of the API anyways
So who would pay literally more for less? Reddit can say all they want about supporting 3rd party but even the blind could see through them
I bet Infinity is doing this instead of hanging up their keyboards like the other apps specifically because they know it won’t work and want to be living proof of it.
As others have pointed out, doesn’t seem like this will work out well for the dev from business (or integrity) POV - Only thing I can think is maybe devs need to act in good faith now to “attempt” to adapt to API changes to then demonstrate the absolute and tangible harms that Reddit caused their business with this quick and reckless change, so that they can then sue after the fact?
Otherwise, what are you doing?
The devs were hoping that they can keep their apps up and their livelihoods without too much additional work, that’s fair from them I suppose. But they should definitely be taking a hard look at porting their existing apps for the Fediverse, if they aren’t yet.
Reddit should be paying users, not the other way around.
Also didn’t reddit already make enough money to cover its server costs several times over selling gold and premium? The only reason it isn’t turning a profit is because of excessive management costs.
Infinity for Reddit is OpenSource: https://github.com/Docile-Alligator/Infinity-For-Reddit
Apparently Reddit doesn’t allow the original developer to publish the app with a field for a user API key… but there are tutorials on what to modify to get it to work, and there might be forks out there with the required fields baked in.
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If the app developer doesn’t have an API key in the app though then what power does Reddit have to stop them? Reddit would have to ban each individual API key that people generated and put in the app, no?
App developers have already agreed to some Reddit ToS in order to get an API key, so one of Reddit’s powers is to sue them. Developers don’t want to risk that, so they just follow the agreement and whatever Reddit tells them.
Individual users would still need to request becoming a developer, a process which Reddit has recently changed, and agree to the same ToS to get an API key, but the risk of getting sued instead of just banned, would be much lower. The ban could include both the API key, and any users using it, so still risky other than for throwaway accounts.
Reusing the official app’s API key though, could be interesting. Still risk getting banned, but interesting.
Christian already had paid subscriptions he’d have to contend with. A much harder problem.
Apollo users tends to browse and interact with Reddit more than other platforms, too, so the per user cost is much higher.
Are there price details yet? Christian was talking about $5 still not breaking even so I’d be interested to see where they’ve landed.
I don’t think there’s any way you could economically run a 3rd party app with the new API pricing. When the Apollo developer did the math it looked very sensible, and IMHO there’s a huge downside to miscalculating the pricing (eg. underestimating the API usage of power users). I wish them luck, but this is probably going to end up pushing this developer into a financial hole, even discounting the extra dev work needed.
Shutting down altogether might be a deeper hole, if people have already paid and would have to receive refunds.