this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
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Apollo - A beautiful app built for power and speed.

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Since many of us are trying to avoid giving reddit any traffic, this space can be used to discuss Apollo, our dreams of seeing it join the Fediverse, and to give our appreciation to @christianselig@mastodon.social for his incredible work.

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Christian has decided to squeeze Apollo again for more money, besides the wallpapers and asking people to decline their prorated refund. Christian additionally forced a pop up ad advertising this plushie.

This is just exposing to more people the greediness that Christian has tapped into recently. Recall that previously, Christian forced daily pop up ads to paid pro users to get them to subscribe to ultra, which was originally stated to only be for notifications since it required a server, but now had all new features attached to it, even very simple local features. Reddit did him dirty, but to be honest, he may have had it coming. He previously disabled ultra access to Jailbroken devices as well, even if they were valid paid users. Christian also didn’t provide refunds to lifetime users who bought it before all the API stuff. Speaking of that, does anyone remember how instead of stating the price was increasing (which happened all the time) he instead said it was “going on sale at the old price”? Kinda misleading.

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[–] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

You’re saying he had 500,000 in income. Minus the fact that Apple takes 150,000 of that, he has to pay server costs, licensing costs for libraries, bandwidth costs, and more.

So he’d be lucky if he brought in 200k a year pre tax. A little high, but not at all crazy for the founder and primary developer of an app.

As for “Reddits content” I think it’s been pointed out hundreds of times by now, Reddit didn’t make the content, didn’t pay for the content, didn’t even promote the creation of the content.

How exactly is that “millions”? That’s just a software developer job.

[–] Whirlybird@aussie.zone 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

As for “Reddits content” I think it’s been pointed out hundreds of times by now, Reddit didn’t make the content, didn’t pay for the content, didn’t even promote the creation of the content.

Reddit owns any content posted on reddit. It's reddits content.

How exactly is that “millions”? That’s just a software developer job.

It's millions in revenue, and he has absolutely pocketed millions from it. Again - he refused to deny it when questioned.

[–] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

So the crux of your argument, is that he made normal amounts of money, over an extended time, which added up to at least a million dollars. And that’s… bad? And somehow the fact that Reddit “owns” the content because it’s a skeevy middle man matters… just because?

[–] Whirlybird@aussie.zone 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

“Normal amounts of money” 😂

[–] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, pretty normal for a developer to make well over 100k salary a year. Take a look at some positions available, and you see many that offer over $200k plus benefits. Add in the fact that he was the main developer, paying his own benefits, and doing work developers don’t normally do… and he’s well within the expected range.

Just because you don’t know what a software developer is worth, doesn’t mean it isn’t “normal amounts of money.”

[–] Whirlybird@aussie.zone 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

A normal developer doesn't take in 500k of subscription revenue a year + god knows however much from one off purchases + donations and merch etc.

I'm a senior developer btw. I know there's lots of money in it, but this guy made millions piggybacking off reddits API + reddits content and then cried poor and threw his toys out of his cot. All he had to do was make a $5/month subscription option for people that still wanted to use his app and he'd still make money from that - just not the millions that he wants.

[–] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Right, “just” charge $5 a month per user. How’s that working out for all the other Reddit alternative front ends? I only know of one, and they only recently started charging so there’s a good chance they are going to need to adjust their pricing.

Did you miss the part where Reddit was essentially asking for over $1 million a month with the (at the time) current api usage?

And why are you still talking about revenue? It’s a meaningless number in this discussion, as I already went into. The reason most developers don’t make revenue from subscriptions is because they make a salary and a company does all the work of dealing with the higher level stuff.

Look at it this way, if this was a company with a CEO, an HR employee, a developer, a back end guy (yeah, you completely ignored that he paid another developer to help) and infrastructure, you wouldn’t be saying anything about $500k profit a year, in fact you’d be wondering how the hell they managed to stay in business without selling personal information. But because this is one individual (plus the developer he paid) suddenly it’s an unreasonable amount of money? lol

[–] Whirlybird@aussie.zone 1 points 11 months ago

Yes, just make your app subscription based at $5 a month. What do you think is so difficult about that exactly?