The popular Apollo for Reddit iOS app has received a solid update today with support for Family Sharing, following users, a range of new icons, open links on clipboard, and much more.
Apollo for Reddit offers a fantastic experience on iPhone and iPad and today’s 1.10.6 update offered a host of new features and improvements.
First up, Apollo Pro or Ultra subscriptions now work with Family Sharing. This was a big request from users and developer Christian Selig has delivered!
Other great changes include new icons for Apollo, the ability to follow users like celebrities or other notable Reddit accounts, tweaks to better show snoomoji (Reddit’s emoji), Share as Image improvements, and a privacy nutrition label for the App Store.
Also open links on clipboard is back, viewing editing comments is improved, and much more.
Apollo for Reddit is a free download from the App Store with Pro and Ultra subscriptions going from $0.99 a month. The app has an impressive 4.8/5 star average rating on over 120,000 reviews.
Check out Christian’s full notes on the release below:
Hey all!
Been hard at work on this update for awhile now. It’s been tricky to split my time between the upcoming iPad version (takes a lot of work!), chipping away at a Mac version, while also keeping the App Store version pumping with requested features and bug fixes, but I’m up for the task!
This update includes a bunch of requested features over the last little bit that should make Apollo even more delightful to use.
Family Sharing
A big one many have requested is that Apollo now works completely with Family Sharing, so if you have other family members on your iTunes account you can pick up Apollo Pro or Ultra as easy as could be. And if you don’t have Apollo Ultra or Pro, family members can get together and chip in to buy whatever you desire and all reap the rewards. You’re going to want to for the next feature!
Icons
A bunch of new icons! Who doesn’t love icons? (If you don’t keep scrolling there’s lots of other stuff too :P) This is the biggest single update in terms of added icons in Apollo’s history. There’s two new Ultra icons, both made by the incredibly talented Matthew Skiles, called Space Shanty (a beautiful rendition of our dude in space), and Roary the Dragon, a beautiful rendition of the Apollo icon as a dragon, which nicely coincides with Chinese New Year which is pretty cool. In addition, there’s two new icons in the Community Icon Pack, by u/berrymetal and u/johnnysilverpaw, featuring an absolutely shocked version of the Apollo mascot plus a beautiful canvas painting rendition. And lastly, for our Pro users, there’s a bunch new secret icons. A bunch of them are based on some video content creators I (and a lot of you) like so I thought it’d be some fun easter eggs, so happy unlocking those, I won’t say anymore. :) Apollo Ultra obviously gives you all of the above icons, so it’s the best way to do it, but they’re available a la carte as well.
Following Users
You can now follow users easily within Apollo. For those of you wondering what that means, if a particular Reddit user (say, a celebrity) has interesting content they can post it to their own profile. It’s kind of a hybrid between a subreddit and a user. So now you can follow that user and posts made to their “own subreddit” will show up just like any other subreddit in your feed.
Little Reddit Experiments
There’s been some little Reddit experiments they’re testing out in some communities with “Snoomoji” (basically Reddit renditions of emoji) and inline GIFs. They were showing up a little funky in Apollo so I wanted to fix that, and now they should display beautifully. The Snoomoji show up inline, and for those worried, aren’t very distracting at all. For the inline GIFs, those can be a little more distracting, so rather than build an entire new feature I just integrated them nicely alongside Apollo’s existing inline comment thumbnail system, so now they’ll properly show up there. Bam.
Reddit’s also doing some stuff with “awarder” and “awardee” karma, where there’s additional categories of karma in addition to the previous “link” and “comment” karma that you now get if you give or receive awards. If you’re interested in seeing a user’s count of these new karmas, on their profile you can tap their header and it will popup with a breakdown of their karma.
Share as Image Improvements
“Share as Image” has really been a breakout crowd favorite feature of 2020, so I’m making it even better! For the uninitiated, if you find something funny on Reddit and want to share it, like a comment or a post, rather than screenshotting it, and cropping it, or stitching multiple screens together, just tap “Share as Image” in Apollo and it’ll do all the heavy lifting for you, stitching together multiple screens, cropping, whatever, all automatically and then just give you a screenshot to share with a friend.
With this update you can now do two more things. The first is sharing links, so if there’s an interesting news article for instance you can share that as well as the comments to it, with a beautiful little thumbnail representing the article, or a picture of the tweet, etc. Secondly, you can hide usernames in the screenshot, in case you’re reposting it to another subreddit that requires you to censor out usernames, or you’re sharing a photo with your grandmother and you don’t want to explain “ThiccDaddy69”.
Includes a “Privacy Nutrition Label”
Apollo now has a cute little “privacy nutrition label” on its App Store page (you know, one of those many things Facebook is in a tizzy over) so you can get an overview of Apollo’s privacy practices at a glance. Spoiler: it’s not very exciting as I don’t want your info. Apollo used to have Firebase integrated for some analytics (what percentage of people use dark mode, most popular home screen icons, etc.) and crash reporting, but in order to slim down and simplify this nutritional label even further I even excluded those. If you want more info, Apollo’s privacy policy page is a pretty easy read too.
Open Links on Clipboard
This was a popular feature pre-iOS 14 that I temporarily removed because iOS 14 added the awesome (honestly! I really like them) alerts when an app is reading your clipboard and some people were understandably getting confused with Apollo.
Basically this feature lets you copy a Reddit link to your clipboard to offer to open in Apollo the next time you open the app, say if a friend messages you a funny Reddit link and you want to read it in Apollo.
This setting is back, (and off by default, Settings > General), but please be warned that if you do enable it iOS will show those potentially scary little “Apollo read your clipboard” alerts when you launch the app, but it’s just Apollo checking to see if you have a Reddit URL on your clipboard. Even if it’s just a URL to a random recipe blog there’s no way to know it’s not a Reddit URL without checking the URL. iOS scientists call this Schrödinger’s Clipboard.
Edited Comments
Someone had a great idea earlier this week that if a comment is edited you should be able to tap the little pencil icon to show when the comment was edited. Well, great idea, person! It’s now added! If you tap on the pencil it’ll show an alert with both the relative date (e.g.: “18m ago”) as well as the absolute date (e.g.: February 2, 2021 at 7:58 PM). Same with edited self posts, as well.
Lost of other stuff!
Read the full changelog below for an overview of everything in this update, as well as all the juicy bug fixes y’all were kind enough to report to me.
Changelog
FEATURES
- A BUNCH more custom home screen icons, two new Ultra ones (both by the awesome Matthew Skiles), two new community icon pack ones (by berrymetal and johnnysilverpaw), and a BUNCH of secret ones included in Pro as well. (Reminder: Apollo Ultra includes all of them!) See if you can find them all! A bunch of them are homages to some of my favorite video content creators.
- Apollo now supports Family Sharing across all in-app purchases and subscriptions, so if you have a family member wanting to get in on the Apollo goodness they easily can now!
- Added ability to “follow” users you find interesting, just like a subreddit!
- Added back option to open Reddit links on your clipboard in Apollo. It’s off by default but you can enable it in Settings > General
- Improved photo uploading in private messages
- Added a suspicious looking text face to list of Text Faces in the comment composer
- Added option to hide usernames in Share as Image (sometimes subreddits ask you to hide them when sharing, or sometimes people just have weird usernames)
- Also in Share as Image you can now share link posts and it’ll include the cute little thumbnail and everything!
- Includes “Privacy Nutritional Label” information! Apollo is a good privacy citizen!
- Added support for Reddit’s new “awarder and awardee” karma that you get for giving and receiving awards. If you tap your/another user’s karma header in their profile it will detail it.
- Added support for Reddit’s new “Snoomoji”. It seems to only be a test in a few subreddits, but you’ll be able to see little Reddit style emoji in comments.
- Apollo now properly displays inline GIFs that Reddit has added to certain subreddits in the same inline way Apollo shows other GIFs in comments
- Added subscribe and follow options to subreddits and users in the haptic touch context menus!
- If a comment or post has been edited you can now tap the little pencil icon and it’ll show you when the comment was edited
BUG FIXES
- Everyone upvoted a bug with a GIF of a fluffy dog in it so I fixed that bug too. Not going to lie the cute dog distracted me a little but I think it was something to do with GIF progress not updating in crossposts.
- Fixed bug where you couldn’t fully disable “tap to collapse”, so now you can!
- Fixed bug where subreddits in subreddit listing in dark mode had slightly lighter background color
- Fixed some issues with video playback
- Fixed crash that could occur when downloading some GIFs
- Fixed background color of inbox boxes in dark mode
- Fixed occasional crash that could happen with opening videos in media viewer
- Fixed bug where haptic touch context menus would be reversed for subreddit and user
- Fixed bug with moderators setting flair where custom flair wouldn’t get set
- Fixed bug where when refreshing your Inbox some messages could randomly disappear for a second or cause the badge count to be incorrect
- Fixed another crashing bug that could occur with formatting dates (calendrical, not the fruit)
- Some other tiny bug fixes and tweaks and tidies that make everything just a little bit spiffier
Thanks!
I would have had even more juicy things in this update, but as mentioned I’ve been splitting my time between the “main” version as well as the others versions you have been begging me to build, so I appreciate the patience while I polish the diamond that is the iPad app, and eventually a Mac app as well. Can’t wait to show you more on the iPad app front soon, got some teasers in mind. :)
Oh, two apps I really love came out with two awesome updates as well recently that if you’re a fan of the indie app space I think you’ll really enjoy. CARROT Weatherhas a dope new update and the UI is gorgeous and mega customizable, and similarly Tweetbot, one of my most used apps, has a really great new update with some UI tweaks and new features that I’m digging.
Thank you as always for the support. I will continue to work hard for you!
– Christian
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