cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/883364
Despite site-stopping protests by mods and users, Reddit leadership chose to brute force its way through any reasonable way of continuing third-party app support. Instead, the company hopes its luxury-priced API will be its secret shortcut to an overvalued IPO. As a result, Reddit’s official iOS app is being torpedo’d in the App Store.
The final days of Apollo may be upon us, but the ramifications of Reddit’s disdain for its users are here to stay. Look no further than App Store reviews to see the results. As TechCrunch reports, data from Sensor Tower shows how Reddit is sealing its fate as a 1-star reviewed app.
The data shared with TechCrunch shows that nearly 91% of Reddit’s U.S. iOS reviews carried a 1-star rating during the initial phase of the protest between June 12–14, compared to about 53% in the previous two months until May.
There has been some ratings improvement lately as the 1-star reviews of the Reddit U.S. iOS app dropped to about 86% between June 15–26, Sensor Tower’s data shows.
That’s presumably because the App Store doesn’t offer 0-star ratings. It’s also telling that Reddit leadership thought nuking third-party apps made sense when its own app saw more than half of its reviews rank it as low as possible.
Reddit app reviews in the App Store have also become a place for users to voice their frustration with the self-sabotaging company.
The data shared by Sensor Tower also indicates the top three most mentioned terms in all of the Reddit U.S. iOS reviews included keywords “apollo”, “third party” and “3rd party,” suggesting users were bombing review ratings in light of the new API move.
Either users are pissed or they’re hosting a lot of birthday parties for the god of truth.
At any rate, there’s been virtually no good news on the Reddit front since the awesome Apollo client was forced to announce its end date. The best Reddit app is closing up shop on June 30 to avoid owing tens of millions of dollars to Reddit before ever seeing its own revenue.
1 star would be appropriate if there have never been 3rd party apps. Compared to competently made apps, that official turd would deserve negative stars.
Why is the overall rating high? Because app stores remove review bombing, and that's because people review bomb products due to every little thing so it becomes meaningless.
Then it's impossible to distinguish actual dogshit products compared to those where someone just made you mad.
I believe the Reddit app isn't even really review bombed. I can imagine people actually trying it when they learned their 3rd party app will stop working, and going holy shitttt what a mess.
we need a federated review system that's not connected to any particular site or company, I believe that's the only good way to avoid such things
Yeah everything about this just makes it ever more clear that we need to escape the manipulation of the big tech companies because they'll all work together to establish their monopoly and milk us for every penny