Reddit on iOS minus ads

So a while ago, Reddit enshittified after taking PE money. Turned off the APIs, blocked third-party apps, etc. And the official app is a really shitty ad-laden experience. So. Do you have

  1. A Macintosh
  2. some code/build experience
  3. and iPhone or iPad
  4. the desire to read Reddit
  5. A $99/year Apple Developer account
  6. Stubborness?

The details would take ages to type out, thus numbers 2 and 6. Drop a comment if this is useful and I’ll write a followup; right now I’d guess I have maybe two-digit readership.

The source code that you want is called Winston, here on GitHub. Yes, like 1984. Clone it, load it into Xcode, and then modify the two bundle identifiers. I use the net.phfactor prefix since that’s my domain; be creative but they have to be unique to Apple.

I vaguely remember that you need to create a Reddit developer token which is also painful (See ) but only needs doing once. The results are well worth the hassle. I just pulled main and rebuilt today after my build expired. (The $99 developer device builds are only good for a year. Apple forces everything through their App Store and this as close as they allow. Yes, it sucks.)

And my local peeps

It’s good to be back.