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by notRobot 1108 days ago
> The goal of making the code for this repo available is to show that despite statements otherwise by Reddit administrators, Apollo does not scrape anything and users purely authenticated Reddit API requests, and does a great deal of work to ensure the Reddit API rate limits are respected.
1 comments

If this is true why does Apollo need its own server at all? Couldn't the client make requests directly to the reddit api servers instead? Then each user could use their own api key, rather than Apollo having to pay millions for a single key that accommodates everyone.
Theoretically it could do it all from the app, but it would have to resort to background updates, which are scheduled at iOS’ discretion. Christian was aiming for consistency, which is why this exists.
The main reason is push notifications. A lot of the communication can be direct, but not the push notifications.
Now it's open source, you can look at the code and find out why.