Given the strong genetic link between wefwef and Apollo, I think it would be great to acknowledge and describe the origins of wefwef’s UX design. In a few months, there will (hopefully) be new signups who never used Reddit, and never had the opportunity to use the awesome piece of software Christian developed over the better part of a decade. I’d like to see the legacy and history of Apollo live on, even if it’s just that iconic icon and a few sentences.
Maybe we could have an “Ode to Apollo” somewhere under the settings menu?
I never enabled them, so I never really noticed. I didn’t feel like the app got noticeably worse. If anything, I got more comfortable with Apollo year after year and the old desktop site I was so familiar with was becoming less appealing over time.
I do understand how, after maintaining the same app as his main gig, he would want to work on something else after almost a decade - especially something with mainstream appeal. There are young folks in my family who got Pixel Pals (the standalone app) after seeing their friends have them. That’s huge.
I hope he does come back eventually to make some Fediverse stuff.
I didn’t really enable the Pixel Pals either.
However, I definitely noticed more and more bugs that weren’t getting fixed, such as formatting glitches and errors connecting to Reddit, and I was also one of the people who got the Ultra Lifetime sale pop-up every 5 minutes last Christmas. Everybody who didn’t get that downvoted me to oblivion and called me all sorts of colorful names because I was apparently a “liar” (as well as everybody else who experienced this). That’s what made me quit Apollo.
Every update since Pixel Pals came out just seemed to be more icons and Pixel Pal features and no bug fixes.
I don’t think Christian was being malicious or anything, but the inability to report bugs because of the rabid fanbase does no good. I’ve reported bugs in lots of software and never got treated like this elsewhere, even when it is open-source. A lone developer cannot possibly catch all corner cases.