Yeah I overlooked a huge step in connecting Apollo to AppSync. I ended up subclassing RequestBodyCreator and fitting it to the AppSync docs.
var body: GraphQLMap = [:]
let data = try! JSONSerialization.data(withJSONObject: ["query": operation.queryDocument,
"variables": [:]], options: .prettyPrinted)
let jsonString = String(data: data, encoding: .utf8)
body["data"] = jsonString
body["extensions"] = ["authorization": "{authorization info}"]
but to get rid of the strange error I forked Apollo and edited like so
https://github.com/monolithic-adam/apollo-ios/commit/2936816801a7ee2ccb68af4ae4f52981cb29b186
It had nothing to do with Apollo at all except for the start_ack not being implemented