Reddit’s only free iOS app icons are ugly now - eviltoast
  • Ertebolle@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Along with everything else wrong with this: your icon is literally your brand, and you want your branding to be flawless + everywhere.

    This would be like Nike putting an ugly pixelated version of their logo on cheaper sneakers to encourage you to buy more expensive ones; whatever pocket change they made from upgraders would be dwarfed by the damage it would do to their trademark.

    • Mereo@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      This. This is what most baffling. Why hide your main icon, your BRAND, behind a paywall? It is simply idiotic. They are really desperate for cash.

    • nepenthes@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      The only thing I can come up with is when reddit was shitting the bed most egregiously, all of the news outlets were showing the app icon in images/thumbnails. Perhaps they wanted to distance a bit from the bad publicity?

      Not that having a Doge button is any kind of brand recognition. I’d argue it’s juvenile for such a “grown up company”, or whatever Spez said about adult business, hehe.

    • btu159@lemmynsfw.com
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      1 year ago

      Can’t have the plebs communicating and organizing freely on the likes of twit or redd!

      All comms must be filtered through the fair and totally unbiased lens of corporate news media. Those millionaire anchors and billionaire C-suites are on our side, after all.

    • crusa187@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Can’t have the plebs communicating and organizing freely on the likes of twit or redd!

      All comms must be filtered through the fair and totally unbiased lens of corporate news media. Those millionaire anchors and billionaire C-suites are on our side, after all.

    • JshKlsn@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Reddit is shit, I’ve deleted all of my accounts. I’m not defending them at all. However, didn’t third party apps literally do the same thing? Where you could buy different themed icons?

      • titaalik@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yeah but it usually was a „support the dev“ thing.

        For example, Apollo (RIP) had an okay icon to begin with, you could choose from a few free ones and if you really liked the app or a specific icon, you could buy it.

        They didn’t intentionally make their standard icon shitty to bully you into paying for a decent one

    • Justice@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      This insane behavior is directly enabled by Apple.

      True story time:

      iOS has never, to my knowledge anyway, allowed changing icons on stock iOS ie not-rooted/jailbroken devices.

      After a decade of stock icons they released the shortcuts app that allows for creation of… shortcuts.

      Some crafty fuckers figured out quickly you could create a shortcut that was placeable on the home screen and could completely replace an the original app in function. Basically a shortcut that you tap and it simply opens some app, any app, and that’s it. And you could give that shortcut any image you wanted. Just download a cool .png or recolor the original one, whatever you wanted. Sounds cool. A shit-ass, annoying work around to an obvious QoL addition (making icons changeable on per app basis or allowing icon theme packs like android has had since forever).

      So story over, people have a work around? Wrong. Apple specifically went out of their fucking way to add this little notification. A small one, but so fucking annoying, which was never there before and cannot be turned off by any non-root access means (so far anyway). Now when the shortcut is run it says like “automation complete” for a second and disappears. There is SPECIFICALLY an option under the shortcuts and automations in iOS to disable those types of notifications but they seem to have added it (because it wasn’t there before, confirmed by old videos where people explain how to set it up before updates broke it) as a giant double middle fingers up fuck you to customers. There’s clearly no reason to not be able to disable that notification completely when you can disable basically every other notification (oh, system update pending can’t be turned off either- gotta make sure you update constantly so you can’t accidentally have a root-able phone one day and escape such bullshit! Oh no!). They’d probably claim safety or it’s a bug or some bullshit if they even bothered to acknowledge it, which they never have and it’s been several years now.

      My only conclusion is app makers cried that they wanted to sell the ability to change icons (or Apple took it upon themselves since they take 30% of that transaction anyway). Or it could actually be a bug. If it’s a bug they have never acknowledged it despite certainly thousands of reports over all the versions of iOS. Not even a “oh yeah that’s not intended. But it’s low priority.” Just silence, so, gonna have to go with the obvious option here. They fucked it as a fuck you to users. Might as well be spez at the helm.

    • Rawgasmic@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      It seems most of the idiots that like to suck spez dick all like it as a tiktok alternative so they can feel superior to tiktok viewers.

    • Moonrise2473@feddit.it
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      1 year ago

      A decade old meme is perfect for this

      Like when Twitter replaced their logo for their April fool’s (which was a couple days late because probably the genius in charge had the idea at the last minute and the remaining h1-b hostages couldn’t push it in time)

  • LazaroFilm@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I. I just don’t understand why they’re even doing this… they’re shooting themselves in the foot over and over, except they’re on a boat and every time it makes extra holes and the ship sinks faster. Everyone else is jumping ship and the ones staying either don’t know they’re sinking or don’t know where to go, or they’re bots.

    • jiji@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      What blows my mind is I think they would have been moderately successful if they just said you need to have Premium to be able to use third party apps. I used Reddit for HOURS a day. Honestly it was bad. I wouldn’t have liked it but I probably could have justified to myself paying a small fee per month to be able to continue using Apollo if they had played their cards right. Instead I haven’t been back since before the blackout. 🤷🏻‍♀️ I should thank spez for cutting my addiction cold turkey.

    • Alto@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Louis Rossmann had a perspective that I’m starting to come around to.

      Spez is just pissed. That’s it. He’s mad that he got shown up, and is actively punishing people for it. There’s no logic or business behind it.

      • Nusm@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Actually, I subscribe to the theory that Spez & Musk don’t care about losing money, because they are being paid under the table more than they’re losing by far right dark money to destroy Twitter & Reddit. Both sites were pretty left leaning before the crap hit the fan, and the right are trying purge all liberals from them. I know it seems pretty “tin foil hat”-ish, but it also makes perfect sense when you look at how they’ve done everything they can to run the sites into the ground.

    • outdated_belated@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      Startup/ IPO valuations are, nowadays, based on profit per user, rather than daily active users. (Or, at least, skewed much more towards the former).

      So, they (comparatively) DGAF if they get rid of 90% of their users if the 10% they do keep click on a shit ton of ads, or buy useless shit, or whatever.

      Related: enshittification

  • AnonymousLlama@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Wtf, who’s coming up with these changes. I’m legit impressed with how many bad PR moves they can make back to back

      • lonewalk@lemm.eeOP
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        1 year ago

        “changes to improve” increase profit margins

        “your overall experience” sadism

    • Moonrise2473@feddit.it
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      1 year ago

      I can’t believe that they chose such an ugly icon

      For what reason, most people doesn’t even know that they could change the icon, free or not

      Unless they put a welcome tutorial like “hate the icon design? Now you can pay to restore it to normal!”

  • Xilly@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I was angry about everything happening with Reddit but honestly I care less and less. It’s like watching Twitter self destruct at this point.

  • Nusm@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I got the new icon, and I thought it was going to be tied into some promotion or something. You know, “We’re going 8 bit for a month!” But then nothing ever came - no promotion, no explanation.