Reddit has recently announced changes to the API designed to kill off 3rd party mobile apps. Most–including those most popular with the privacy community–will shutdown at the end of hte month. This matters to the privacy community because 3rd party apps were the primary way to access Reddit on mobile in a semi-privacy-preserving manner.
Infinity for Reddit, the most popular open source reddit client for Android (which unlike the official app is free from trackers and ads) is one of the apps that will be shutting down.
Fortunately, being open source, people have created a workaround where you can import your own API key to get around the new API restrictions. It takes some work, and might be intimidating to non-technical users but its not difficult. It remains to be seen if this will be a sustainable medium term solution (long term migration to another platform should be the goal), but it is one of the only options at the moment (the other is to use RedReader which received a temporary exception). Here are the instructions:
**Summary**
Thanks to Oha_der_erste’s help and ChatGPT, I managed to create a Google Colab script where you input your own API token and it compiles an APK file with the token.
Maybe you want to do this after 1st of July or now, your choice.
- Backup your current settings in the App [Settings → Advanced → Backup settings (or so)]
- Open the Google Colab Script and run the snippets with the instructions (Please read it carefully, you don’t need ANY coding experience as you don’t touch the code)
- Uninstall old App
- Install the APK
- Login and restore your settings (if needed)
If you see the name “{YourRedditUsername}-app” (or whatever you chose) while logging in, you were successful- Restart the app for the settings to apply
It uses a Keystore file I created with the name, password, etc. “Infinity”.
Update 2023/06/18: I added the changed Redirect URI and Useragent.
If anything else has to be updated, comment it.
Also I added a option to upload it directly to file.io with QR code
Just to be clear, I am not the creator of this, I can’t and don’t vouch for it, and I can’t provide tech support for it. You should always be cautious when running unknown code from the internet. In this case, I do know that the creator of Infinity is aware of it, has commented on it, and given feedback, so that should give at least some credibility to it. Still, as always, do your due diligence.
Possible shortcomings of this workaround may include:
- will automatic updates work? IDK but I imagine we will need to update/manage this manually
- Will there even be updates to the app at all, if the Infinity app isn’t usable without these workarounds, will development even continue? IDK
- Using a personal API key may make you more easily identifiable if you used inifity without an account (but if you were signed into an account on Infinity it shouldn’t change anything)
- security? I don’t know what I don’t know, maybe there are security implications, or maybe this workaround doesn’t change much.