So, my understanding is that third party apps are supposed to have the user authenticate via OAuth (or some other means), and then the app requests content from Reddit’s servers under the user’s authentication, because the user’s authentication is what determines whether the user can see the contents of i.e. private subreddits and mod privileged post/comment views, & take mod actions.

My understanding is that anyone using a phone/tablet third party app isn’t going to even get close to the 60 items per minute limit that existed.

It’s also my understanding that moderators would hit the 60 items a minute limit if they were using Toolbox to action a bunch of comments in a post, or were actively clearing the mod queues of several large, active subreddits, simultaneously.

The only way I can imagine that Apollo would be charged premium firehose api access is if Apollo was being a man-in-the-middle between Reddit’s servers and their user base — if Apollo was running a server, which server was authenticating as the users, and then the Apollo server was sending material back to the phone/tablet client app.

Which … should not be happening, for oh-so-many reasons.

For one, if Apollo is doing that to remove Reddit’s advertisements and/or insert their own advertisements … that would be shenanigans.

If Apollo is store-and-forwarding user data — are they complying with California user privacy & GDPR requirements?

etc etc etc

If I’m using a third party app to access Reddit, I do not expect that the API calls made by the app to go through the app publisher’s systems.

So I’m really not grokking how this state of affairs is a crisis for a third party app publisher, unless the third party app publisher architected their app in a completely upside down fashion, or is pulling some sort of MITM shenanigans, or the publisher completely misunderstands what the changes to the API will mean.

In short, “where’s the fettucine?”