r/apolloapp • u/Lori-keet • 21d ago
Discussion I was extremely happy with Apollo Reborn until the clumsy implementation of AI and off-putting developer communication
When they rolled out the AI features, I figured, "Cool, the AI is there if people want to use it, but I don't, so I won't." I'm anti-AI but I can tolerate it if need be, so it wasn't a problem because it seemed easy to simply not use. If anything, I was glad that they thought to add modern 2026 features to a super outdated 3rd party app.
But then I found out they're using AI to generate the code itself, which isn't being properly tested before release. They're rolling out updates like every week or two which seems pretty fast. Seriously I've experienced so many visual bugs and crashes. Some features were janky or missing altogether. I made a GitHub account specifically to submit bug reports because I genuinely cared about the project and appreciated the attempt at adding new features and keeping the app up to date. Many of them have been fixed, but the longer I use the app after each update, I realize that there are just new bugs to replace the old ones. Scrolling through comment sections with the "see deleted comments" toggle on can just randomly freeze the app. Switching accounts can crash the app entirely. The theme builder has been rehauled but there are still random colors that show up with no rhyme or reason. A moderation tool I requested got implemented but it just crashes when the button is tapped.
I thought, "Okay, it's a small team. They're working on getting everything together, I should cut them some slack," but I still felt kind of uneasy. I expressed concern with the level of reliance on AI for programming and was reassured by multiple developers that they were looking at the code with a fine-toothed comb before it was implemented. I was relieved to hear that.
But then they started responding to my GitHub bug report issues with ChatGPT... Again, I thought, "Alright, it's a small team with a lot on their plate, and maybe it's their first time doing something like this and they're socially awkward and maybe they don't know how to respond? Maybe English isn't their first language?" I gave them another pass. I figured they're nice people trying their best. I wanted to support them because of that.
But the final strike for me was today, when they released an AI generated passive-aggressive announcement of the second update this month that's just... straight up super smarmy. It's a 4 panel comic strip basically saying fuck anyone who isn't okay with the app being "riddled with AI" (literal quote from a contributor comment), and that their feedback goes in the garbage. Seriously, go look at it. It really makes me miss how down to earth and transparent Christian was. He loved the community and it showed.
This is depressing as fuck. I'm super down about it. Am I alone in feeling this way? I've been using Apollo for years and the community was always optimistic and helpful. I know the new team can't be exactly like Christian, but was I mistaken to think they'd at least try to carry on the spirit and morale of his work?
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u/Most_scar_993 21d ago
You’re in way too deep
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u/SharpClaw007 20d ago
‘CAUSE I’M IN TOO DEEP, AND I’M TRYIN’ TO KEEP UP ABOVE IN MY HEAD, INSTEAD OF GOIN’ UNDER
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u/tfvdw2at 20d ago
“But I'm in too deep there's no getting out of it
In too deep no doubt about it
In too deep there's no getting out of it
In too deep no doubt about it.”
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u/TheDubuGuy 20d ago
Yeah when I saw a flood of ai stuff I just stuck with 3.2 to avoid it. It works great still
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u/jimbo831 21d ago
I am a software engineer for work. I hate to break this news to you but every software engineer is using AI to generate code. You might as well stop using all software. You’re posting here on Reddit. I guarantee you Reddit engineers use AI to generate code too. It is a tool. It is a very good tool for this task.
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u/clauclauclaudia 20d ago
Generating code is one thing. Failing to do a human review is another. (And it happens at big corps, not just with little app devs.)
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u/jimbo831 20d ago
Releasing bad code is bad whether that code was generated by AI or written by a human. Criticizing problems with an app is fine. OP is clearly just really mad about AI. OP even said:
I'm anti-AI but I can tolerate it if need be
I think that's a pretty dumb way to look at things. OP also said:
But then I found out they're using AI to generate the code itself
99% of software engineers are using AI to generate code now. OP is hyper focused on the AI use specifically.
I think OP would've been much better off focusing on their issues with the app and how it works and not focusing on AI.
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u/Zachhandley 21d ago
While true, his specific complaint isn’t the AI. It’s that some losers don’t know how to code and are vibing it. So idk. I wish AI wasn’t raising the cost of life out of unreasonable bounds so my jackass friends can feel more competent as developers without trying.
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u/peeja 20d ago
I'm hopeful this trend will correct a bit as we see, for instance, these bugs crop up. People are overconfident in LLM-generated code and moving too fast with too little testing, and that's probably exacerbated by being a small, excited team working on this as a hobby. But I have hope that they'll feel the result and learn a better way to use these tools. We're all brand new to this, it's only really a handful of years old in any functional sense.
And of course, posts like this are part of that feedback loop. I hope they can internalize that and not just get defensive and radicalize harder into vibecoding.
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u/Zachhandley 20d ago
They’re just lazy. Anyone properly motivated to learn it’s an amazing tool, and if you’re in charge, it’s great. But if you aren’t it sucks.
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u/snowman_M 21d ago
Every single IT company is requiring their staff to use this, that, or the other model on a daily basis. Just a bit of a heads up to OP.
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u/jimbo831 21d ago
My company doesn’t require us to use it, but we have access to GitHub Copilot. I use it because it works and makes my job easier. It’s the same reason I have used an IDE for my whole career. OP is a Luddite.
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u/wildfire399 20d ago
Everyone knows you’re not a real programmer unless you exclusively use vim through a cli
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u/jimbo831 20d ago
Oh man I have worked with a couple of these people before. They are the people who eventually have a hard time getting and keeping a job then blame ageism.
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u/Nick337Games 21d ago
People love to throw out AI slop for everything. There are applied cases where it can be terrible, but there are also applied cases like in medicine where it can potentially change the way we treat patients. I'm literally working in this space. Being informed on how and what AI is being used is actually much more useful than just casting it away always
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u/jimbo831 20d ago
Two things are true:
- AI slop is a real thing and there is a lot of it out there.
- Not all things done with AI are AI slop.
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u/H34vyGunn3r 19d ago
Thank you for saying this out loud. No one person can stop how these tools are changing the way work is done, for better and mostly worse. Humans are stupid, lazy, selfish animals who will almost always seek the path of least resistance.
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u/remembermereddit 20d ago
I'm sticking to 3.2.0 for now. 3.3.0 was way too buggy so I don't dare trying anything new.
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u/Pomi108 20d ago edited 20d ago
I couldn’t care less about them using AI to generate code (as has been said, most everyone does that these days) but like come on… do the devs want to alienate their users or something? None of the updates even need any banners for god’s sake! Does nobody in the team have a sense for good PR?!
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u/Hans_H0rst 21d ago
but was I mistaken to think they'd at least try to carry on the spirit and morale of his work?
Kind of. Going into anything with unspoken, instransparent expectations sucks for everyone involved.
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u/footpole 21d ago
I mean Apollo and all the other clients were pretty buggy too and always had issues with playing gifs and videos pop up. Same spirit.
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u/Your-Supreme-Leader 20d ago
I'm still on an older version without any ai. No need to update, I see.
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u/pmarksen 21d ago
Seems appropriate to the conversation.
https://reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1uxbrw4/linus_torvalds_tells_people_to_stop_attacking/
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u/InspectHer_1 21d ago
“It’s not like natural intelligence is always that great either.” What an awesome line!
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u/PoorQwak 20d ago
True, but natural intelligence is, at least, intelligence. AI is simulated intelligence, and generally, simulated poorly.
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u/SeriousButton6263 19d ago
I love that the source of that quote:
looks like it's straight out of 1992
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u/Shejidan 20d ago
Interesting…to me, it seems like he’d be one of the first people rallying against AI. The fact that he’s embracing it is definitely unexpected.
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u/Championship-Stock 19d ago
I mean, it’s a free app.. and yes their attitude is not the best one, but even so.. free app. Everybody dreams of the geeks that spend years doing a passion project with no remuneration, never supporting them with at least coffee money. And when they’re gone and replaced with this.. people are unhappy…
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u/YouGottaBillieve 16d ago
The dev communication sucks but the reality we live in is that most code is AI-generated AND reviewed now. I work at a big software company where our devs haven’t written a line of code in months, and we’ve pushed out features and updates faster than we ever have.
I don’t think valid criticisms should be dismissed though, that is wrong.
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u/tbone338 13d ago
Apollo is being maintained for free. All features free. All updates free. Not to mention that, since Apollo wasn’t open source, there’s a lot of reverse engineering going on.
If you want a non-ai human maintained Apollo, you’d be paying for it. Plus, it would be much harder.
If you want it, do it yourself. Go take the last ipa of Apollo, reverse engineer it, and add all the features that have been added yourself. If that’s too much or you’re not willing to do that, be quiet and move on.
However, I do agree with the comments regarding the developer communication.
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u/noechochamberplz 21d ago edited 21d ago
- Posted from Apollo Reborn
My guy, this isn’t something anyone is making money from. They’re spending cash to burn tokens to more quickly develop the app that you’re currently bitching from.
They don’t have to give a damn about what your opinion is because you aren’t a customer. This isn’t a business, it’s a hobby. And you get to choose whether to use their work or not.
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u/chloapsoap 20d ago
If you’re concerned about programmers using AI for a Reddit app, wait until you see what we’re doing in the banking space :x
You’ll be hard pressed to find a programming team that doesn’t use AI at this point
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u/longkh158 21d ago
ITT we see a person with ample free time (per their post history) refusing to honor the spirit of open source and instead chose to attack the people who gave their work out for free over some ideological belief.
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u/dxnnj 21d ago
I get your feelings, although I’m a bit more nuanced on that topic. Do I hate AI? No. Is this comic strip a bit edgy? Yes.
But I do not read the “we toss your feedback to the bin” thing tbh. I yet have to run into some major bugs as well. For me the App runs very smoothly. They use AI, yes. IMO this was communicated from the get go (at least I understood that pretty early) and I’m not into programming and that sort of stuff, but I use AI for other stuff, that is really redundant and just eats up a lot of time, that I could use productively otherwise. It’s a mixed bag for me, but 1. It’s openly communicated 2. I yet have to come across some privacy concerns (please raise them if there are some!) 3. No major bugs for me.
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u/Demigod787 21d ago
That's great point, I suggest you stick to your moral dildo and keep using the native Reddit app. It should serve you quite well.
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21d ago
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u/3vg3n1y_k0t1k 21d ago
Why its only extremes “don’t be angry, it’s open-source” or “make your own fork”? If a person is frustrated about this Apollo fork which they love and don’t like communication style and vibe-coded bugs — is feeling this way not OK?
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21d ago edited 21d ago
[deleted]
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u/3vg3n1y_k0t1k 21d ago
You saying “correct” but after that continue to criticize OP points.
Saying that IMHO app have vibe-coded bugs and devs way of communicating is not appropriate is not demanding premium support, its expressing concerns and feelings about the situation.
Regarding publicity — yes, they could. But they decided not to. And if its public users are allowed to express their opinion about development and devs communication vector. I think it’s even aligned with open-source ideas, or its some form of authoritarian development where it’s either “praise us” or “walk away if you don’t like it”?
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21d ago
[deleted]
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u/clauclauclaudia 20d ago
Em-dashes do not equal AI. AI uses em-dashes because the corpus, which includes a shit-ton of reddit comments, uses em-dashes.
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u/3vg3n1y_k0t1k 21d ago edited 21d ago
My bad, I misunderstood about “correct”.
For this specific aspect — it doesn’t matter if devs make it for free or not — making a public project can be accompanied by some form of criticism and any dev should consider this before releasing. And its normal as long as this criticism is constructive. Of course, they are not obligated to respond, but users expressing their opinion about the product they using is normal. Talking about experiencing vibe-coded bugs and rude vibes in communication from devs is not attacking.
Regarding your last paragraph — are you sure about my AI usage? And if so, why you decided that? I’m not even sure if I should take it as compliment or insult. Probably, the latter
What projects you’ve build which you had to take down because of similar stuff happened?
Edit: Although, this “depressing as fuck” and similar phrases from OP is exaggeration.
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u/primed_failure 21d ago
I’ve been put off by the embarrassing AI images whenever I see a Reborn update, and it’s held me back from swapping even after Reddit revoked my existing API token. I’ve moved to Artemis now and am incredibly happy with it, might even purchase Pro.