When Christian Selig took to Reddit four years ago to request user feedback for his app Apollo for Reddit (“I had a very alpha version—maybe that’s generous,” he says), little did he know where it would lead.

Today Apollo is the way millions of users interact with the platform—and make it their own. The app offers customizable gestures for upvoting, navigating posts, and other common tasks. The Jump Bar lets you quickly move among subreddits. You can even change the appearance on a subreddit basis, so r/leagueoflegends will look distinct from r/music.

The App Store spoke to Selig about finding his calling, what he’d do if he won the lottery, and the joy of coding in SwiftUI.

Apollo for Reddit makes it easy to browse your favorite topics and find the internet’s best cat pictures.

How did you get started in app development? Going into university, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but the prospect of the App Store, where you can build something and have it in somebody's pocket the next week, sounded really exciting. My university didn’t have any iOS development courses, so pretty much everything I know has been self-taught from all the great resources out there.

Why a Reddit client? Reddit’s one of the websites where I spend a lot of time, but I wasn’t happy with any of the experiences. I wanted something that felt at home on the platform, that felt comfortable and familiar. In an almost selfish way, Apollo scratched an itch.

What have been your favorite features to implement? The most recent one is widgets, because it was my first exposure to SwiftUI. I also really love custom app icons. People like being able to put a fun twist on their Home Screen.

What advice do you have for people who want to start developing apps? Try to find a community that’s passionate about the project you’re working on, then connect. You can have a great idea, but eventually it becomes bigger than you and will be used in ways you didn’t expect. When you have a wide variety of people using your product, they can give you insights you didn’t necessarily think of.

How has the success of Apollo changed your life? Even if I won the lottery tomorrow, I would still be doing this. It’s really fun to build apps and have people use them.

Originally published on the App Store

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