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Comment by compumike | Hacker News Reader

I believe that if you look at this moment a year from now, it will be a major inflection point, bringing reddit to a much larger audience.

We're all tech savvy on this site and may not mind monkeying with the previous third-party apps, but there's a much wider audience that will be willing to use a well-supported first-party app.

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The problem is no one really uses apps anymore. Especially to view a website when you already have a mobile app that does that for you (your browser). This feature is 3 years too late in my mind to be a needle mover.

>The problem is no one really uses apps anymore.

This is an absurd comment. Even some of the various unofficial reddit apps have 5-10 million of downloads each.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andrewshu....

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.onelouder....

Most people download zero apps [1]

[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/mobile/most-people-download-zero...

Zero on average every 3 months is a lot different than zero ever. Reddit is a website most of its users use long term, not some random app you might use once a week or once a month. Their app will be downloaded a lot, and having tens of millions of downloads on unofficial apps is proof of that.

16% of people use an app more than twice [1]

26% of apps are only opened once [2]

[1] http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/16-percent-of-mobile-use...

[2] http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/mobile/03/21/app.engagement.gah...

Did you only read the headline of those articles?

>As TechCrunch recently reported, technology analysts at Compuware found that mobile apps are still the preferred means of connecting for most users over mobile websites, with 85 percent choosing the former over the latter.

I did and the last sentence in that article states:

> Responsive websites may help shift that opinion, though that won’t likely happen anytime soon.

Since most of these articles are 3+ years old, I personally believe that responsive webpages are the way to go, especially for Reddit which is 99% text &images, or hyperlinks to external sites.

Nice strawman you're building there. We're talking about reddit, a unicorn by most standards - at least in terms of user base. This isn't some random app with no promotion or user base.

Im not building a strawman, Im just saying it's very late in the mobile game for reddit to build an app and expect it to 1) be good and 2) get used. it was about 5-6 years ago that 'apps' were the popular big thing and companies needed to have them. Reddit is a mostly text and image based website, the features it uses do not need a native app framework around it for them to continue to be popular. They should have focused more on making the mobile web experience better instead of building an app. They already have a strong web presence, use that to your advantage instead of shifting their focus to an app store somehwhere. Again back to my original post, its 3-4 years too late for this to be a needle mover for them and with their latest round of fundraising they need needle movers.

*per month.

I still use mobile apps. I'm somebody?! Just a short list: Alien Blue, Craigslist+, Google News, NPR News, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. That said, there are quite a few websites/web apps I save to my home screen (like HN) on my iPhone as well for instant access. If there is a well designed mobile app (for a service I enjoy) that takes advantage of the OS's built in features, I typically use it.

> The problem is no one really uses apps anymore

This might be a bit of a generalization. People tend to use apps for websites they visit very frequently (eg more than 2-3x a day). Even more so when the mobile version of the website is rife with bugs and/or limitations.

Reddit's mobile site is passable but the third party apps blow it out of the water on both iOS and Android.

Just basing it on research Ive seen [1][2][3] and my own personal use. If the reddit application is feature poor, there isnt a reason to not use the web version, maybe with an extension or two to make it awesome.

[1] http://qz.com/253618/most-smartphone-users-download-zero-app...

[2] http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/mobile/most-people-download-zero...

[3] http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/22/consumers-spend-85-of-time-...

Supporting anecdote: my wife won't use Windows Phone or Windows tablets because the Pinterest app apparently sucks on those platforms.

Counter anecdote: I refuse to use the Facebook app on iOS because it takes like 500mb and the website works about 90% the same.

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