Reddit’s plan to kill third-party apps sparks widespread protests

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Enlarge / The Reddit iOS app icon. (credit: Getty Images | Yuriko Nakao )

Reddit is getting ready to slap third-pary apps with millions of dollars in API fees, and many Reddit users are unhappy about it. A widespread protest is planned for June 12, with hundreds of subreddits planning to go dark for 48 hours.

Reddit started life as a geeky site, but as it has aged, it has been trying to work more like a traditional social network. Part of that push included the development of a first-party app for mobile devices, but the 17-year-old site only launched an official app in 2016. Before then, it was up to third-party apps to pick up the slack, and even now, the revenue-focused official app is generally considered inferior to third-party options.

Reasonable API pricing would not necessarily mean the death of third-party apps, but the pricing Reddit communicated to some of its biggest developers is far above what other sites charge. The popular iOS client Apollo announced it was facing a $20 million-a-year bill. Apollo's developer, Christian Selig, hasn't announced a shutdown but admitted, "I don't have that kind of money or would even know how to charge it to a credit card."

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