The creator of Apollo for Reddit has moved onto smaller and weirder issues

Christian Selig might not be engaged on Apollo for Reddit anymore, but it surely appears he’s doing simply high quality. Since shutting down Apollo due to the potential prices of Reddit’s usage-based API pricing, Selig has poured his power into Pixel Pals, a widget-focused app that takes benefit of many iOS options in some shocking and pleasant methods. According to Selig, the app is proving to be profitable, too.

As an instance of what Pixel Pals is now able to, look no additional than Language Pal, a language-learning widget that just launched for free. With Language Pal, you may observe vocabulary throughout 10 completely different languages (together with, hilariously, “Canadian”) by means of a guessing sport widget proper in your homescreen.

Language Pal is only one of many widgets you may choose from. There are extra conventional widgets like calendars, clocks, and battery percentages. You can look after the lovable pixel animals as a part of a Tamagotchi-like digital pet sport. I’ve been impressed by the opposite video games — you may play a full model of 2048 as a widget, although it’s a little finicky. And there are extra widgets within the works, too; Selig tells The Verge he hopes to launch a trivia widget (“Trivia Pal”) by October twenty seventh.

Pixel Pals is free, and also you don’t should pay a dime to have the ability to use the overwhelming majority of what the app gives. However, there are just a few methods Selig makes cash from it, together with an an choice to pay actual cash for digital meals in your pixel mates and a premium subscription ($1.99 monthly or $14.99 per yr) that provides you entry to issues like extra pixel animals.

Pixel Pals has been a giant success for Selig, and he says it was even earlier than Apollo shut down. “Pixel Pals does weirdly well,” Selig tells The Verge. “Even when Apollo was in its heyday, Pixel Pals was about 40 percent of my overall revenue, and it’s only gone up from there now that I’ve had more time to focus on it.” He says he might see Pixel Pals approaching $1 million in annual recurring income by the top of the yr, “which would definitely exceed Apollo.”