Reddit gets its app to 50m Play Store downloads | Hacker News Reader

Reddit gets its app to 50m Play Store downloads

androidpolice.com

18 pointsarbhassan52 comments

I can only imagine half of the downloads came from people trying to select the “web” option on the popup and missing.

On a serious note, it must really be a good strategy to utterly ruin the web experience, if you want to get more people on your app, because its been the hot new thing for a while. At least with Reddit, third party clients are well-supported, unlike say Twitter. I use Apollo on iOS.

I haven’t noticed any issues with Tweetbot on iOS.

There's a few things it doesn't support (like polls) because Twitter didn't add those features to the API.

I don't think that the new UI is intentionally bad. I can't imagine the team that pulls it off. It must be hell to work there or it's a team of sociopaths. Imagine plannings with power points on how to mess with users.

I agree that the new UI is worse, I'm just baffled by the reasons why it's the case. Probably bad management / structure.

I can say as someone who runs a small niche subreddit, users have been finding my sub at a much increased rate in the past 6 months, I suspect because of the "related subs" boxes that auto insert themselves in the new design.

If their aim was to improve the discoverability of smaller subs, they've achieved it.

It's not all bad of course, it's a complex product so you can simultaneously delivery useful features while making the design / usability worse.

Slide on Android. Available in the F-droid store too.

Personally a fan of Sync for Reddit. Multiple interface methods (list, card, full-page swipe) and other reader niceties.

> it must really be a good strategy to utterly ruin the web experience

Aggressive stance by Safari and Firefox isn't helping online businesses reliant on extensive user-tracking.

Apple controls the AppStore so it is more likely that Apple devices would soon become the de-facto choice for people trying to evade surveillance.

I'm genuinely surprised they haven't backtracked on this - it completely ruins the experience.

The twitter dark pattern of forcing you to refresh is so stupid

What is that all about?!

I've been wondering, every time I click a twitter link in iOS from say slack, I get the stupid partial load and then the refresh message.

I think it's designed to frustrate you into downloading that app

Twitter UI uses a token to authenticate all operations with their own API.

When you use the mobile application the token is refreshed automatically.

When you use the web version it does the same but only if you are logged in.

It happens to me all the time. I don’t use Twitter myself but many people in my circle of friends and colleagues do. They constantly share stuff that is posted on Twitter and almost every time I click these links I get the error message because the token in my web browser storage has been invalidated, so I have to reload the page one or two times to force the UI to request a new token so I can see the content and then forget about Twitter for a couple of hours until another friend or colleague shares another link and the circle repeats again.

Try using nitter -- a no js twitter interface. Reading UX is so much better with it.

What pattern is this? I use the PWA with Firefox and I haven't encountered any dark patterns involving refreshing myself.

I've totally stopped using reddit. It is incredibly annoying that every single page has that annoying popup.

Change the www in the url to an i

Or an "old".

You can use "old.reddit.com" instead of "www.reddit.com", but you might get an SSL error if you try to use "https://www.old.reddit.com/...".

I did not know the i.reddit.com, I did know the old one but it is not of much use on a mobile phone

there's a firefox plugin for that :)

Link: https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect

I made an (experimental) extension for Firefox that lets you choose which version of reddit you want to use

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/reddirect-new...

Am I the only one that likes the official Reddit app? I used Alien Blue before, which has actually been replaced by the official app, and there's nothing I can complain about in either. The only regression is that now there are ads, but I find them so unintrusive I don't really care.

I like it too, it's clean and simple,

Apollo is great. Reddit should be embarrassed that one solo dev can make a vastly better app than the Reddit team itself.

In addition to that google's AMP made reddit totally unusable, after clicking on a link it kept taking me to logged out version which hides most of the comments, and sorts them by "best".

Remember that there's an https://old.reddit.com, it still works great, I use only this version now. There are browser extensions that automatically redirect you to the old version (not on mobile, unfortunately).

Yeah, I thank everyday I'm able to browse with old.reddit. Tried a few times on mobile, but it's really hard to use old.reddit on the small screen. The new web interface is OK on mobile, a bit slow.

i.reddit.com is very good for mobile

One hidden gem that many people don't know about (and which I prefer over apps) is....

http://i.reddit.com

You can still find the older but better web version at old.reddit.com.

set in my options as default and never ever wanted more

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...

And https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kiwibrowse... so you can install that extension on your phone

i.reddit.com for me is the sweet spot. If they remove that one, I’m out.

Use

https://github.com/Docile-Alligator/Infinity-For-Reddit

https://github.com/QuantumBadger/RedReader

https://i.reddit.com

https://old.reddit.com

The app is probably the only reason Reddit has any commercial value.

The website version is almost unusable without old.reddit.com and a reformatting/feature adding plug-in called RES. I have to assume there is a huge crossover between people who will seek out plugins and people who run ad blocks or VPNs. I'd love to see a breakdown of just how little Reddit make per user on ads on the web based site.

This is before we begin to discuss the major functional problems with Reddit...

- Any community over 5k-10k users dips in quality extremely quickly.

- Any unprepared sub which gets randomly hurled on to the top of /r/all will have issues for weeks if not months after.

- Geo related subs reflect the actual locations so poorly its an embarrassment to the city/country.

- The voting system which along with subscriber growth only helps speed up the hivemind effect.

- Finally powermods who seem to treat reddit as a second job, manipulating a large amount of the content based on their own personal feelings.

Do you have any ideas on how you would change reddit to fix all these issues?

Specifically the community moderation and voting system?

Finish selling it to China and start again?

I think a lot of the flaws I've listed are pretty fundamental to how the platform works, it was broken from the whiteboard stage.

"Nobody goes there any more, there's too many people..."

"The people who used to go no longer turn up because the quality has dropped so far"

Take a look at /r/investing, its the same 4-5 companies and the same boring daily questions.

Well yes, that's the nature of reddit and has been since subreddits were introduced. There's always been a tension between newbies coming in and making identical posts asking identical questions and the people who've been there longer who're bored of seeing the same questions asked day after day.

Usually there's some attempt to ban the newbie posts to make the sub more interesting for the more experienced participants, but this cuts off the supply of new posters and the sub begins to decline. Alternatively more knowledgable people get bored and drift away.

I user Reddit Is Fun app religiously for the past 5 years.

The moment they decide to cripple 3rd party apps is probably when I'm quitting reddit. Don't even get me started on the new design which I opted out of.

Ironically Reddit ruining the mobile experience and pushing to use their app so badly forced me to download a 3rd party App to read Reddit (Apollo).

By doing this I no longer see any Reddit ads.

If they hadnt pushed so hard to use their app and ruin the entire Reddit mobile experience, I would still probably just be browsing on their website (which would give them some ad eyes).

Now I'll never switch back - Apollo is just awesome for Reddit.

Reddit isn’t a high enough priority in my life to warrant having a specific app for it, and I prefer a browser for most websites. I do have banking apps and a couple of other types, but it just seems like a waste of space just to browse a website.

Pretty much the only reason I have a Reddit account is so I can filter the feed.

How could I disable Google AMP for reddit searches completely :)

I’m more annoyed of that than their mobile site.

Stop using google search :P

You are right. I tried Bing and the results are without the AMP links crap. Now, I just need to figure out how to force reddit links to i.reddit.com from Bing search!

Is there a way for the content blockers on iOS to block the annoying app download banners (used by Reddit, LinkedIn, and so many others)? I would pay 99¢ for an app that did a good job of blocking all of these.

I'm amazed that Reddit still has such an open API that you can build apps that are far better than their own, and yet they make the mobile web experience so bad to try to push people toward the app.

Recent reddit app discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24208958

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