Reddit

actually though how do you justify charging for your normal bloody unaltered logo lmfao

This. This is what most baffling. Why hide your main icon, your BRAND, behind a paywall? It is simply idiotic. They are really desperate for cash.

The only thing I can come up with is when reddit was shitting the bed most egregiously, all of the news outlets were showing the app icon in images/thumbnails. Perhaps they wanted to distance a bit from the bad publicity?

Not that having a Doge button is any kind of brand recognition. I'd argue it's juvenile for such a "grown up company", or whatever Spez said about adult business, hehe.

Right?

Can’t have the plebs communicating and organizing freely on the likes of twit or redd!

All comms must be filtered through the fair and totally unbiased lens of corporate news media. Those millionaire anchors and billionaire C-suites are on our side, after all.

Reddit is shit, I've deleted all of my accounts. I'm not defending them at all. However, didn't third party apps literally do the same thing? Where you could buy different themed icons?

This insane behavior is directly enabled by Apple.

True story time:

iOS has never, to my knowledge anyway, allowed changing icons on stock iOS ie not-rooted/jailbroken devices.

After a decade of stock icons they released the shortcuts app that allows for creation of… shortcuts.

Some crafty fuckers figured out quickly you could create a shortcut that was placeable on the home screen and could completely replace an the original app in function. Basically a shortcut that you tap and it simply opens some app, any app, and that’s it. And you could give that shortcut any image you wanted. Just download a cool .png or recolor the original one, whatever you wanted. Sounds cool. A shit-ass, annoying work around to an obvious QoL addition (making icons changeable on per app basis or allowing icon theme packs like android has had since forever).

So story over, people have a work around? Wrong. Apple specifically went out of their fucking way to add this little notification. A small one, but so fucking annoying, which was never there before and cannot be turned off by any non-root access means (so far anyway). Now when the shortcut is run it says like “automation complete” for a second and disappears. There is SPECIFICALLY an option under the shortcuts and automations in iOS to disable those types of notifications but they seem to have added it (because it wasn’t there before, confirmed by old videos where people explain how to set it up before updates broke it) as a giant double middle fingers up fuck you to customers. There’s clearly no reason to not be able to disable that notification completely when you can disable basically every other notification (oh, system update pending can’t be turned off either- gotta make sure you update constantly so you can’t accidentally have a root-able phone one day and escape such bullshit! Oh no!). They’d probably claim safety or it’s a bug or some bullshit if they even bothered to acknowledge it, which they never have and it’s been several years now.

My only conclusion is app makers cried that they wanted to sell the ability to change icons (or Apple took it upon themselves since they take 30% of that transaction anyway). Or it could actually be a bug. If it’s a bug they have never acknowledged it despite certainly thousands of reports over all the versions of iOS. Not even a “oh yeah that’s not intended. But it’s low priority.” Just silence, so, gonna have to go with the obvious option here. They fucked it as a fuck you to users. Might as well be spez at the helm.

such innovation!

A decade old meme is perfect for this

Like when Twitter replaced their logo for their April fool's (which was a couple days late because probably the genius in charge had the idea at the last minute and the remaining h1-b hostages couldn't push it in time)

What blows my mind is I think they would have been moderately successful if they just said you need to have Premium to be able to use third party apps. I used Reddit for HOURS a day. Honestly it was bad. I wouldn’t have liked it but I probably could have justified to myself paying a small fee per month to be able to continue using Apollo if they had played their cards right. Instead I haven’t been back since before the blackout. 🤷🏻‍♀️ I should thank spez for cutting my addiction cold turkey.

Louis Rossmann had a perspective that I'm starting to come around to.

Spez is just pissed. That's it. He's mad that he got shown up, and is actively punishing people for it. There's no logic or business behind it.

Startup/ IPO valuations are, nowadays, based on profit per user, rather than daily active users. (Or, at least, skewed much more towards the former).

So, they (comparatively) DGAF if they get rid of 90% of their users if the 10% they do keep click on a shit ton of ads, or buy useless shit, or whatever.

Related: enshittification

What’s new: “changes to improve your overall experience “. Haha. Sure.

I can't believe that they chose such an ugly icon

For what reason, most people doesn't even know that they could change the icon, free or not

Unless they put a welcome tutorial like "hate the icon design? Now you can pay to restore it to normal!"

He's gotta keep up with his dream daddy Elon.

It’s like they are taking advice out of Musk’s playbook on how to blow away money.