This is one thing that I’m still scratching my head about. Like, Reddit said no once, and everyone just shrugged and moved on.
I’d understand if most just threw in the towel completely and never wanted to work with Reddit at all, but it seems most would prefer continue to work on their apps.
And since most apps were free or even FOSS, why not say screw that, and make a (perhaps) last update with a field for the user to enter their own key?
Of course only a few users would take advantage of that, but then there’s even less reason for Reddit to actually care about that, if they could even detect it at all.
I know some forks may pop up, I’m just wondering about the devs themselves.
A few years ago I wrote a simple app to pull data from the Weather Underground site via APIs. Because of API limits I did exactly what you’re proposing. The app had an easy way to enter a key and each user was responsible for signing up to get a key and putting it into the app.
This was a very small scale app, so the data may not be meaningful, but for every person who used it I got two or three comments from users who chose not to because it was just too difficult.
Bear in mind that the “difficulty” involved going to a website, entering your name and email address, and pasting the key it provided into the app.
I suspect that any app where you have to get your own key would have to overcome a lot of resistance.