I would describe Apollo as an accessibility app in the sense that the regular Reddit app is unusable.
"Non-commercial," AKA give us all your hard work for free. No subscriptions, you won't be compensated for your work. How are you supposed to make enough to support your app as a dev in this scenario? You're not. It's all PR damage control and it's pathetic. Once again trying to profit off free labour.
How do they define "accessibility app". It sounds like almost every third party app is more accessible than the official app. So they're all addressing accessibility needs.
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I believe it's a bait.
Over at r/ModCoord they say they held a private call with some developers, none of the 3rd party apps devs were invited apparently.
There's a sticky post containing full notes of the call (I don't know if it's ok to link reddit here so I won't), their promises are really vague, "promising" to let some apps use the API for free is only one of them, they're offering to postpone the API changes if mods don't close the subs, and they're making a lot of excuses for their very lacking tools, "promising" they'll do better this time.
If we consider they're going public later this year, it makes sense they're trying to damage control as much as possible so the protest doesn't ruin their IPO, while actually having no intention to follow up on their words.
If magazines start picking up on their empty words, like the article you linked, it could appear redditors are protesting for nothing, that would be really sad.
Stickied comment here is what /r/Blind, one of the most prominent fighters for the accessibility features, has to say about it.
They weren't even invited.
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When you think of it it's easy for /r/blind to go blackout
@RadDevon Nothing more than a thinly veiled acknowledgement of the current protest.
Doesn't matter if they extend it from July to September, it's _still_ going to be implemented. What a joke of a website.
So include accessibility features in your already existing third party app and problem solved? Or does it need to be an app exclusively for people with disabilities?
"Non-commercial" is still going to kill all development for all the third party apps regardless. This is surprisingly worse than their original decision, because now they can try and pretend like it's other people's problems to make their website accessable.
that's not true. There are open source 3rd-parties like Infinity that are non-commercial.
Infinity is awesome, I'm really going to miss it
The developer hasn't said Infinity's being killed afaik, he appears to be considering having users enter their own Reddit API keys, although really that's going to be a barrier for some
This isn't a viable solution in my opinion though, depending on whatever restrictions Reddit chooses. Atm we know the new API won't allow access to NSFW labelled content, but there could be other limitations coming when users start plugging their own keys into apps
Thanks, I have no idea what "entering your own API key" even means, so yeah, definitely a barrier for me