Likely not possible on iOS. Apple has too many restrictions. It works with lemmy because lemmy has a free API and doesn’t attempt to obscure it’s code. New reddit employs a ton of stuff to try and stop these types of efforts. Apple has a ton of restrictions surrounding code execution and browsers (all browsers have to use safari’s engine). That being said, I am not an iOS developer (outside of cross platform tooling), so it might be possible, but from what little I know of Apple’s policies, not likely.
That being said, I am thinking about the idea of a reddit proxy addon for lemmy, something that would expose r/* communities to lemmy via an API. This would primarily be of use for developers, but could potentially allow r/* communities to exist alongside lemmy communities, with the caveat that reddit users would not see comments. The proxy would actually scrape reddit for posts/comments, cache them in redis, and offer the cache up via a restful API, so it wouldn’t be realtime, but it would be a starting point.
What do you mean; It’s VERY possible on iOS. Apple doesn’t restrict their web app APIs the way they restrict compiled binaries. Wefwef is a web app and a good one.
Web extensions are extremely limited by Apple. That is why we don’t have uBlock origin. A PWA alone would not get the job done. This isn’t talking to an API. You would have to parse out the HTML and reformat it, intercepting links, etc. View the source of new reddit and you will see what I mean.
You also can’t design around old reddit because they are killing that next.
It’s possible to write a web app that accesses Reddit APIs and loads comments and gives you an Apollo-style experience. You seem to be thinking of a web viewer app for the site, which isn’t the same as what I’m referring to. For example I’m using wefwef which is a good web app for mobile and desktop.
The reddit API is paid now. What do you think all the fuss is about? From the limited digging I have done, new reddit does not use an API (in the typical sense, it returns components to the client side with the content, so things are prerendered).
The Reddit API is free if below a certain threshold, and paid for a certain higher amount. Spez was trying to be misleading and claimed 90% of apps wouldn’t be affected but he was including every homebrew app etc. The fuss was that all popular apps would shut down, and low popularity apps negotiated a deal. Point is that a web app is still possible, using APIs until it hits the limits. You could try to scrape comments but that would get blocked by bot filters probably quickly.
This was informative and not too technical for a layman. Good work, thank you.
You can use an app like Hermit to do that. It works because Reddit thinks it’s a browser. I’ve heard that Reddit is planning on stopping browsers from accessing it also, but I don’t remember the source, so I’m not sure if it’s accurate or not.
You mean like mlem?
It would still use the API. Doesn’t matter if it’s a native app or a PWA.
It’s a question… Sort of? See rule #1.
Wefwef still uses the Lemmy API. It would still be subject to the same pricing farce as all other third-party apps. If you’re going to do that…why build a new app?
