Apollo is “a beautiful Reddit app built for power and speed” and it is indeed just that. Designed and developed by former Apple engineer Christian Selig, it’s simply remarkable. Two recurring themes at Daring Fireball are that native apps tend to be better than web apps, and that if you’re going to make a native app, it should be a good native app, that embraces the user interface idioms of the platform.

You know how Apple’s own apps for iOS are very iOS-y (they more or less define what it means to be iOS-y) but Google’s iOS apps feel foreign and weird because they’re designed around Google’s own Material Design idioms, and an app like Slack, though technically native, just seems weird? Apollo feels like what we’d get if Apple itself made a Reddit app for iOS: fonts, layout, colors, scrolling performance, works exactly how you want it to on both iPhone and iPad.

I’ll be honest, I’m not a heavy Reddit user, but Apollo is so nice it tempts me to use it more. If you do use Reddit and care about using good native apps, you’re nuts if you don’t try Apollo.

★ Friday, 24 August 2018