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.
They don't have VC money riding on this. VCs aren't offering the kind of money that Apple cares about, especially when the trade-off is getting caught 'fixing' the marketplace somehow.
But there doesn't need to be dirty money in play - Apple has long been inclined to manipulate ratings in the App Store, and almost universally in ways that trend more positive. Even as a completely free app that generates no revenue for Apple, having it on the store and having it highly rated on the store makes the App Store look good. Apple wants there to be a positive impression of using their walled-garden app environment and highly-rated free apps for popular sites and services supports that. They can even argue that the ratings on their store prove that theirs is the better environment, because Reddit for iOs is rated better than Reddit for Android, and "they're the same app!" so therefore it's the platform that gets credit for the gap consumer perception.
More, Reddit needs to generate revenue, and lots of users are reaching the site from mobile. It makes sense to find ways of monetizing the app, especially if they can corner the market on it - and Apple gets a cut of all purchases made through their platform.