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Comment by sigmar | Hacker News Reader

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sigmar

>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....

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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.

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