[ludocode]

>So why is Apollo so much better than the official app?

It's because of misaligned incentives.

Third-party clients are good because their only focus is to provide the best user experience to the website content. The user is the customer, and pleasing the customer is what makes money.

First-party clients have all sorts of competing goals: showing ads, data mining, maximizing engagement, soliciting upsells (Reddit badges) and other dark patterns. Many of these conflict with providing good UX (especially ads.) The user is not the customer, advertisers are, so when the customer gets what he wants, the user gets the shaft.

First-party clients for ad-supported websites fundamentally can't be good. That's just not incentivized by the business model.

[alwayslikethis]

Furthermore, having third party apps in directly against the business model, which seeks total control of the user's attention to deliver ads and optimize for profits. They are hoping to bump their valuations up before the IPO by this.

[dsab]

Great analysis of first party vs third party clients, it open eyes