“I don’t start working on something unless I’m confident it’s something I care about” — Christian Selig, Apollo

If you’re a Redditor, chances are you’ve used or at least heard of the Apollo for Reddit app. Created in 2015, Apollo was the most popular 3rd-party mobile app for browsing and posting on Reddit — until it was shut down in 2023 after Reddit imposed cost-prohibitive fees for accessing its API. 

This week on the Sub Club podcast, we chatted with Christian Selig, the independent iOS developer who built and lovingly maintained Apollo for nearly a decade. We talked about Christian’s path to indie development, where the idea for Apollo came from, what processes/frameworks Christian used (or didn’t) to build Apollo, and how he ultimately made the decision to shut it down.

Mission start

During his university years, Christian was an intern at Apple, where he was inspired to build iOS apps of his own. At the time, there weren’t many 3rd-party iOS-first Reddit client apps, so Christian decided to build one himself — and Apollo was born. According to Christian, he didn’t employ any fancy frameworks or processes to build the app. He just started working on something he was passionate about, regularly used the app himself, and collected user feedback and feature requests from the /r/ApolloApp subreddit. Apollo quickly became a hit with users, garnering nearly 5 million global installs by 2023 and surpassing several other 3rd-party Reddit apps to become the most popular way of accessing Reddit outside of the official Reddit app.

The end of an era

In April 2023, Reddit announced it would begin charging for access to its API. This change had enormous consequences for 3rd-party apps like Apollo — API access that had previously been free could now cost developers millions of dollars per year. With only 30 days’ notice for the change, Christian quickly evaluated what impact this would have on Apollo and determined that these costs would make his business unsustainable. In June 2023, he made the difficult decision to permanently shut down the Apollo app.

Onwards and upwards

While this is undeniably a sad ending to a beloved app, Christian has a positive attitude about the experience. We asked him: Knowing what you know now, would you do it again? “Oh my gosh, in a heartbeat,” he said. “It was a great run, I had a ton of fun doing it. I just feel really fortunate that it lasted as long as it did and that I got to build something so cool that influenced so many people. It’s hard to be grumpy about it. It would feel almost insincere or like a lack of gratitude for the cards I was dealt.”

Since shutting down Apollo, Christian has kept busy with several new projects. He’s launched two new apps (Juno and Pixel Pals), as well as a YouTube channel. (Check out the video where he built a keyboard from scratch!) When we asked him his secret for launching three successful apps, his response was pretty simple: “I don’t think I start working on something unless I’m really confident it’s something I care about.” We couldn’t have put it better ourselves.