Reddit found itself in the middle of a massive controversyfollowing its sudden decision to charge for its API access, which had been available for free all this while. Thisresulted in widespread outrageas several massive subreddits decided to go darkwhile many popular Reddit apps like RIF and Apollo were forced to shut shops,leaving only a few clients that survived. But this new open-source app has found a free workaround to deliver your favorite Reddit content, albeit with a few caveats.
Free access to Reddit’s API may not be viable for the social network financially, but it did bring about a massive and thriving community of third-party Reddit apps that drove a ton of traffic each month. When the API inquiries became chargeable, these apps found themselves in limbo because ofthe excruciatingly high access fee running into millions of dollars annually for large players. This new open-source app calledGeddit, developed by Kaan Giray Buzluk, uses a different approach to let you access Reddit content by circumventing the need to pay for Reddit’s API.
Source:Geddit
Geddit instead taps into Reddit’s public RSS feed to deliver you content straight from the social network, and there are quite a few things that you can do with it. For instance, it lets you search for posts, users, subreddits, and even within subreddits. You can sort your feed by the same filters Reddit supports, follow subreddits, and share posts externally. Geddit currently has zero ads, is completely anonymous as no data is shared with Reddit, and even lets you view NSFW content, which Reddit’s API has started restricting for third-party apps.
However, you will miss many of the community features that people use Reddit for, considering there is no way to log in with your Reddit account. This means you cannot interact with posts, including commenting, nor can you customize your feed. Since the app relies on the public RSS feed, any private content is out of reach, too. While being anonymous on Reddit has quite a few benefits, you must be prepared to deal with Geddit’s downsides as well.
Despite being the first Geddit release, the Android app lives up to what it promises to do. Hopefully, the developers will be able to make it feel more native to Android and offer more features with whatever little flexibility they have with the RSS feed. You can try out Geddit for yourselfby downloading the app from GitHub. The developer is also exploring an F-Droid submission. In the meantime, we hope Reddit works out a middle ground that makes things sustainable for third-party apps and clients as well.
