YSK: A partial workaround to Reddit's anti-user API changes has been created for Infinity for Reddit

Privacy and Security Guides
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Tl;DR 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.

  1. Backup your current settings in the App [Settings → Advanced → Backup settings (or so)]
  2. 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)
  3. Uninstall old App
  4. Install the APK
  5. Login and restore your settings (if needed)
    If you see the name “{YourRedditUsername}-app” (or whatever you chose) while logging in, you were successful
  6. 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

edit: Just to be clear, I am not the creator of this, I can’t vouch for it, and I can’t provide tech support for it. You should alwys 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.

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Possible shortcomings:

  1. Lack of automatic updates?
Summary

I don’t know what affect this manual method has on automatic updates. But my guess is that since we are building and installing the app manually, it’ll need to be rebuilt and updated manually as well, I am not sure about this though.

  1. Lack of updates in general in the medium term?
Summary

If 3rd party apps dead, and only a few hundred or thousand use this workaround, will the app continue to be maintained by the original developer? by others from the community who rise to the occasion? I don’t know.

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Kinda figured a workaround was imminent after this issue got so much attention.
How long until these 3rd party Reddit apps just ask the user for an API key using a GUI on install? Or maybe even provide a script to automate it? If this change from Reddit sticks, which it looks like it will, then I’m sure this is just where all apps are headed, at least FOSS ones.

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I think that probably this will be attempted at some point by someone in the open source community. There are other apps that already work this way for other services.

But from the little I’ve read, I get the impression that the Infinity for Reddit developer feels that he cannot (officially) do this based on what Reddit communicated to him. He has been careful with his words (not encouraging or directly helping people to use their own key and not making an official guide or anything, while at the same time making it clear that it is possible and hinting at it).

I think you are right, and I think that an automated script might be the best approach to thread the needle and avoid a crackdown while still making it easy enough to implement.

I imagine like with youtube frontends, we will see a diversity of projects and approaches emerge to address this problem.

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Yeah, I would imagine the Reddit developers don’t want every single user making an API key, so I doubt they’ll be very supportive of this idea. Interested to see how everything pans out.

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