cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/883364
Despite site-stopping protests by mods and users, Reddit leadership chose to brute force its way through any reasonable way of continuing third-party app support. Instead, the company hopes its luxury-priced API will be its secret shortcut to an overvalued IPO. As a result, Reddit’s official iOS app is being torpedo’d in the App Store.
The final days of Apollo may be upon us, but the ramifications of Reddit’s disdain for its users are here to stay. Look no further than App Store reviews to see the results. As TechCrunch reports, data from Sensor Tower shows how Reddit is sealing its fate as a 1-star reviewed app.
The data shared with TechCrunch shows that nearly 91% of Reddit’s U.S. iOS reviews carried a 1-star rating during the initial phase of the protest between June 12–14, compared to about 53% in the previous two months until May.
There has been some ratings improvement lately as the 1-star reviews of the Reddit U.S. iOS app dropped to about 86% between June 15–26, Sensor Tower’s data shows.
That’s presumably because the App Store doesn’t offer 0-star ratings. It’s also telling that Reddit leadership thought nuking third-party apps made sense when its own app saw more than half of its reviews rank it as low as possible.
Reddit app reviews in the App Store have also become a place for users to voice their frustration with the self-sabotaging company.
The data shared by Sensor Tower also indicates the top three most mentioned terms in all of the Reddit U.S. iOS reviews included keywords “apollo”, “third party” and “3rd party,” suggesting users were bombing review ratings in light of the new API move.
Either users are pissed or they’re hosting a lot of birthday parties for the god of truth.
At any rate, there’s been virtually no good news on the Reddit front since the awesome Apollo client was forced to announce its end date. The best Reddit app is closing up shop on June 30 to avoid owing tens of millions of dollars to Reddit before ever seeing its own revenue.
Even before the protest, just over half of reviews were 1 star? Jesus.
How is that possible when the app has a 4.8 rating?
It doesn’t though? At least on Android, it’s 3.6.
It says 4.3 on android for me
Reviews in play store are now somewhat based on region and type of device you use so the score will vary between people. For me it’s 3.6 as well right now.
What? My play store says the reddit app has rating of 3.8
Mine says 3.5
I guess it’s not a true average. Many sites use weighted averages to influence such ratings and give less weight to bad reviews especially when they are flooding in like right now.
I don’t get it. Are they removed?
Makes you wonder if Wall St pays attention to anything outside of its hallowed halls?
Wall st doesn’t give a shit about user feedback. Sadly the Reddit app was the only app generating ad revenue for Reddit, so that’s all they care about, users are an avenue to profit for them, nothing more
Everything makes sense of you follow the money.
I’d go a step further and say, they only need to convince the pension investing zombies it’s the next hot offering “once in a life time” “ground floor” growth stock. Wall Street will dump this on retail’s head and buy the bag back out at the bid for Pennie’s before they sail it up the mast again on inflated earnings. Rinse and repeat until the name is utterly broken.
they kinda drove ppl to 3rd party apps. i mean, if there was a tiktok app with less needs for permissions or less spyware, ppl would prefer that as well.
And ofc apple is using their platform to remove and suppress low ratings. Its so dam suspicious that the app has essentially only 5 star ratings now. 4.8 out of 5.
This is an actual case where 1 star reviews are completely valid.
And there are literally long written scathing reviews about how bad the app is that are suspiciously five stars, it’s like spez himself has the ability to moderate the reviews
I think thats more so a symptom of people trying to bypass apple’s attempts to remove bad reviews.
I deleted my 12 year Reddit account in protest. I refuse to support Reddit now.
👀
There are tons of new 5 star reviews that are obvious bots on there. Really interesting read.
different story for android
Look at that rating distribution lol
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Doesn’t seem to affect the average rating that much
1 star would be appropriate if there have never been 3rd party apps. Compared to competently made apps, that official turd would deserve negative stars.
Why is the overall rating high? Because app stores remove review bombing, and that’s because people review bomb products due to every little thing so it becomes meaningless.
Then it’s impossible to distinguish actual dogshit products compared to those where someone just made you mad.
I believe the Reddit app isn’t even really review bombed. I can imagine people actually trying it when they learned their 3rd party app will stop working, and going holy shitttt what a mess.
We all know google has the knowledge and tools to know if something is real or not (at least much better than they currently do) but they make their app store unusable for people since only recomending spammy-fishy-microtansaction-antiprivacy-tracking apps that further their overall goals.
Also true
we need a federated review system that’s not connected to any particular site or company, I believe that’s the only good way to avoid such things
Yeah everything about this just makes it ever more clear that we need to escape the manipulation of the big tech companies because they’ll all work together to establish their monopoly and milk us for every penny
one star review for the reddit app are being edited to 5 starts
It seems like it. I see a lot of reviews that are like “app is garbage. hate it. 5 stars.”
Lemmy seems like it’s picking up steam as a worthy adversary to Reddit. We just have to convince more people to use it.
Also sort only positive comments by “Most recent” and you will see only some bot responses, while Critical are much more in depth.
Wow. Is Reddit responsible for the 5 star bots? Desperate, desperate.
Judge by yourself, but looks like bots to me.
Someone had to make these bots.
…some of those bot reviews are… choice, lol.
Thanks for reminding me to post mine
Starship troopers.gif
“I did my part!”
Ratings looking good still on iOS.
I just downloaded the Android app, gave it a one star review with a few sentences of why, then uninstalled. Sad but there the way it goes
Bahahaha! the zero star button. I like that.
Stupid reddit gets what it deserves.
Always bugged me that platforms juice all ratings by having 1 be the lowest possible
Downloaded the app, rated 1⭐, then disabled it.
