Is it so unreasonable to charge 20m/year to a super popular iOS app? I don't know.
Does apollo make money from this? Do they take advertisement income? But I imagine, if you are the most popular app, on the most popular mobile platform, of a very popular site like Reddit, there has to be a lot of money floating around no? They definitely have income, and definitely have expenses (development isn't free). Curious to actually see the balance of these.
But if reddit want people to use their own app, I don't see why they would support Apollo for free. I also don't know that the actual cost towards reddit would be. A reasonable price is probably somehwere between 0 and 12k.
The deal with WWW is as follows:
You provide a website on the server. The client downloads it and decides how to render it. An API is going to be more efficient than HTML plus all the bells and whistles. But if you don't provide a reasonable API we go back to the stone age of HTML clients which parse and scrape. It is going to be more nuisance for client and server. Load is more intense and it requires more bandwidth at the cost of user engagement. And you'll get barely more advertising income.
The reasonable fix is paywall; stop with the advertisement BS and enforce a per month subscription per account regardless how the client communicates.
I'd be willing to shell out the bucks for Reddit Premium if that would let me keep using Apollo.