Looks like theres a final surprise in the form of a song in Apollo now that it’s closed.

Can anyone identify the artist?

EDIT: someone managed to find it. From Christian’s YouTube page:

A fun parody of Sarah McLachlan’s I Will Remember You performed by the incredible Zoe Wynns

  • existential_crisis@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    arrow-down
    72
    ·
    1 year ago

    How about instead of wasting time circle jerking in your 10 minutes of fame, you dedicate a few hours to add Lemmy/kbin/mastodon/whatever support to Apollo and actually support your users?

    Although wefwef pretty much completely fills the gap left by Apollo, it still annoys me to see the way this guy is handling this situation. Not only is he doing jack shit to support his loyal longtime users, he went through the effort of updating the app to beg people not to refund the subscription.

    /end rant

    • PuffyPanda@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      30
      ·
      1 year ago

      Glad this is downvoted. It takes way more than a couple of hours to completely change your apps backend to read from a completely different website’s API. And that’s not even thinking of how complicated dealing with the fediverse is, dealing with multiple domains and logging in through multiple fediverses.

      The guy doesn’t owe you anything. Please be quiet.

      • Flaky@iusearchlinux.fyi
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        10
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        I think he needs a break from all this before even thinking about building a new app. Having your work basically get tarnished in front of you, then being dragged through the mud by an arrogant brat in power who was obviously lying to and about you, having to deal with the refund process, that’s gonna take a toll on anyone’s mental health.

        I do hope he can make an Apollo for the federated alternatives like Lemmy and Kbin, but like I said, he needs to sort the closure of Apollo out before even thinking on any new apps.

        • FlihpFlorp@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          12
          ·
          1 year ago

          Honestly as much as I want Christian to push his app to lemmy as I used Apollo for barely under a year and loved it the man deserves a break

          Someone in the Apollo sun said it’s like watching a great mobile home that has great amenities and features and great memories and then watching someone drive it off the Grand Canyon and light it on fire

          • Flaky@iusearchlinux.fyi
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            5
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            Agreed. I remember reading on his Mastodon that he was feeling stressed about it all. Between that and the sadness of having years’ worth of work gone, yeah. He deserves the break. That person summed it up pretty well.

            (On that note, Tom Scott just published a video about his 3 month break in 2024)

            • FlihpFlorp@lemm.ee
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              6
              ·
              1 year ago

              I honestly hope Christian is ok yk

              Like I said I want him on all but I was crying this morning before work and last night I got the $5 wall paper pack and declined my refund for ultra I can’t imagine the gut punch it is for him

              • Flaky@iusearchlinux.fyi
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                4
                ·
                1 year ago

                Same. I got Ultra, the wallpaper pack, declined the refund too. I’ve been feeling a lot of grief which feels weird for an app, but I just gotta let my feelings do the works I guess. :V

      • existential_crisis@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        0
        arrow-down
        43
        ·
        1 year ago

        I recommended his app to people, I paid for the subscription, I left a positive review on the appstore. I was a loyal user for a long time.

        In the end, he tried (and fortunately failed) to sell Apollo to reddit, then just killed the app when that didn’t work. If he did care about users (aka the people that made him a lot of money), he could’ve sold the app to someone willing to continue it, or at least released it as open source.

        It’s not the end of the world, and he didn’t eat a newborn baby or anything like that, but I don’t think people should be patting this guy on the back for the way he handled this. He just took the money and ran, abandoning his customers in the process. That’s not the type of business I want to support.

        • chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          20
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Reality check: vast majority of the people don’t give a shit what you or I do.

          I am a day 1 user, bought lifetime pro within the month, and lifetime ultra on launch. I recommended the app to people. And guess what? No one gives a shit about me nor my recommendations. They’ve got their use out of the app; they’re happy that they’ve got a better Reddit experience while they were able to use the app; and now that the app is no more, they can be their own grown ass adults and decide what to do about the situation.

          The app is down, due to no fault of the developer, and that’s that. And no, the developer didn’t take your money and ran with it. He’s offering refund for the unused subscription portion which yields a net deficit of estimated 250K USD that he will have to pay back to Apple after Apple Pay’s out people who doesn’t opt out. Given the situation, do you have 250K USD liquid cash to pay Apple on a 30 days notice, or would you rather ask nicely for some to choose to opt out of the refund? Because if you don’t, then maybe you shouldn’t be whining about your $13/yr subscription that you’re getting your prorated refund by choosing to not opt out.

          The “bad guy” of the story is Reddit’s management. Not even so much for their goal of killing third party apps — their platform, their rules, that’s why we’re no longer on their platforms, and no longer playing by their rules — but rather their approach to the problem every step of the way. They could’ve announced a longer run way — “Starting 2024/01/01…” would’ve gave Christian (and other app devs) ample time to pivot and update their subscription model to make it work; limiting the maximum number of users (a-la Twitter in mid 2010s), however bad, would’ve still allowed the app to continue to exist. Demanding $20M/year on a 30 days notice, slander the devs, and actively suppress the entire moderation and user community? Bold move Reddit, let’s see how this will play out in a couple of months. Third party apps are likely but the first casualties of their decisions to implement this change.

        • SpezCanLigmaBalls@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          11
          ·
          1 year ago

          It’s not that hard to understand that the price he pitched to Reddit was simply a way to show how outrageous it was. All he did was simply say okay you are charging me x per month so then you are evaluating my app at x dollars. Since the amount he offered was very low compared to “long term evaluation” just to show how stupid they are.

          So what this dude didn’t sell off his app to someone else? He has been making that app for a decade. If he was just trying to sell it like you’re implying then he easily could have. He was making a point.

          Imagine you worked on something you loved for a decade and then out of nowhere it got ripped out from under you and it wasn’t usable or financially responsible to keep it going. Would you just go off and sell whatever it was or be like “hmm… maybe I should keep this since I’ve spent so many years on it and adored it. I could also just take a step back and relax before thinking about a way I could make it work”.

          It’s this thing called having empathy for other people and understanding how having something like that happen could discourage you and make you want to just take a bit to yourself without immediately thinking about the next step.

          Don’t make sense why you are so up in arms about people having empathy and respecting the decisions the dev made.

          • turquoise@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            5
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            What most people missed, much less understood, from that interaction is that Reddit justified the API cost based on “opportunity cost”.

            This means that Reddit was saying that they weren’t trying to kill off third party apps but that they simply were trying to charge $20MM/y to recoup the earnings they’re losing out on by virtue of people using Apollo instead of Reddit’s own offerings.

            So yeah, like you said, he clearly tried to call BS on the price motivation by essentially saying “if my mere existence is causing you to lose out on $20MM/y of earnings, why don’t you cut a check for $10MM to buy Apollo”.

            Because logically if it really was about opportunity cost and the pricing of $20MM/y would accurately reflect that, then a one time $10MM purchase would be such a steal compared to losing $20MM/y, it would have any CEO scrambling to sign a check the moment the option was even so much as whispered.

            Instead the API pricing was simply a ploy to kill off third party apps and the “opportunity cost” nonsense was mere pretext to be able to maintain that it wasn’t about killing off third party apps.

            Not to mention that outside of the vacuum of this specific matter, the whole ordeal was littered with duplicitous lies, like how it would be a fair and reasonable price when every other comparable API is multiple orders of magnitude cheaper, safe for Muskrat’s.

            Imgur for example would charge $166/50 million request, compared to Reddit’s $12,000 for the same amount. Or put it differently, Imgur charges $276,666/y compared to Reddit’s $20MM/y.

    • Kasumi@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      15
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Idk. I think he tried his best behind the scenes and publicly. Regardless of how it ended, I think he watched a nearly decade-long passion project he built effectively on his own get torched due to corpo decisions out of his control. Tbth, I don’t doubt he didn’t want to repurpose the app for a plethora of legal (app store, subscriptions, etc) reasons - but he’s probably exhausted.

      At least, I know I’d be.

    • erezac@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      ·
      1 year ago

      Haha yeah, what an asshole deciding himself what to work on and not humbly serve some strangers on the internet :D

    • crunchypotat77@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      1 year ago

      My guy, it takes way way way more than a few hours to “add support”. You make it sound as if it’s so easy.

      He spent years building that app, improving it, only to have the rug pulled out from under him. I’m sure any developer would be pretty distraught by such an event. I know I’d be.

      • EliasChao@lemmy.one
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Some people non-ironically think that all he needs to do is CMD F “Reddit” and change it to “Lemmy” in the app code, and all the functionality would be there.

    • turquoise@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, how dare he, after almost a decade of work, refuse to get back into the code mines at your whim and repurpose the app super easy in “a few hours”.

      /s

      Get a grip.

      Not only would it take far more than “a few hours”, he owes you jack all.

      Even if he would be interested in making a Lemmy app, he’d be well within his right to take a break from things.

    • madjo@geddit.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      He created Apollo, because he was a reddit user and wanted a mobile app that didn’t suck. So he created one of his own.

      He’s not (yet?) a lemmy or kbin user. So he has no need for an app here.

      There are plenty other developersp here that do use lemmy/kbin and are busy with creating apps for those platforms. How about you support those other developers instead of complaining that this one developer isn’t doing what you want him to do.

      Also, he didn’t try to sell Apollo. He was making a point how ridiculous the API charges were.