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.
Reddit on the Google Play Store still has 4.5 stars. We gotta fix that.
Did my part, it’s at 3.4 now
I did my part! 3.6 as of now.
3.6 stars now…
3.0 in europe. I did my part a week ago. Glad to see it working.
It’s 3.6 in the UK still.
Seems to have been stable at 3.6 for the past few hours. Have to remember to check back after July 1st to see how bad it gets (hopefully)
Quite a lot of people probably haven’t actually used it yet.
But after July 1st people may actually genuinely be reviewing it which will be a fun experience for them I’m sure.
It is somehow worse then new Reddit on the web.
Heading over there now.
I went to do my part, but forgot I already gave the app a 1 star rating 5 years ago. It’s always been a piece of crap.
That won’t do!
I’m doing my part!