Sadly, the reddit website has become a travesty - especially on mobile. A huge "DOWNLOAD THE REDDIT APP" banner obscures literally 30% of the page. There is a teeny-tiny "view on mobille site" link in small, low-contrast text that can be used to dismiss the annoying banner. Due to its size and user-hostile design, the Reddit banner is even worse than most news sites that try to push their newsletter/app/subscription with similarly annoying banners.
I dropped the mobile app because it was occupying over 200MB of space, and my inadequately equipped iPhone ran out of space. I switched to the mobile site, but now avoid that as well due to the constant, in-your-face app promotion. Every website with a mobile app these days:
"I get it, you have an app, I don't want the app, stop telling me to download it."
Edit: Thanks for the helpful replies - however staying completely off Reddit is probably better for my overall wellbeing. Reddit is no longer a "happy place" for me, the racists, trolls, shills, and bigots have ruined it for me. To top it off, I was recently banned by admins (not mods) for "attempting to evade a subbreddit ban" which was a result of my using a VPN - no thanks.
This is why I never saw the setting to disable the app prompt. Reddit tracks every single action on their site (no duh) and I don't feel like being monitored when I'm on the toilet looking for LULZ
I smiled when writing that, expecting this very response ;) - I'll just stay away completely as per my parent comment edit.
The kicker is that Reddit's "activity feed" in the right hand sidebar is what revealed, or reminded me of this behavior. Without it, I probably would have continued to ignore the obvious / bury my head in the sand. Thanks Reddit!
Neither this nor the alternatives in the replies to you mention anything about moderator tools.
Even the official reddit mobile app only finally got things like viewing mod queue, and approve/remove/spam, very recently. Which means until recently using the actual site on my phone was the only way I could use reddit.
This may seem like a niche request, but it holds back the ability of moderators to use reddit mobile apps, and in turn prevents that class of "power users" from being able to recommend an app to friends.
(and even the site itself isn't great; on desktop I use multiple browser extensions to add functionality reddit itself should be providing)
Yeah but I don't want to use another app for that. I already have app for browsing Reddit - it's called web browser and I'd like to keep using it rather than downloading yet another app that does basically the same.
Seconding Reddit is Fun - it has a very decent UX (about the only thing I'd love to see improved is the comment box, especially around quoting stuff). It's lean, bullshit-free, actively developed and offers all the features you'd have on the website (at least all that I know of).
If I can offer a suggestion. If you have android then I'd recommend you switch your browser to firefox and follow these steps (not sure if iOS has firefox, or if it does, if these steps will work on it):
1. download uBlock origin for it (yep, same add on, works in android firefox)
2. browse to reddit, an interstitial should pop up nagging you to use the app.
3. open up the menu and select uBlock origin at the bottom, select the eye dropper tool.
4. click on the div that is dimming all the content, this should give you an option to filter it out, uBlock will give you a list of parent elements you can add to the filter instead. In this case the one you are looking for is .DualPartInterstitial. You can verify with the preview button.
This will commit this div to your personal filter list.
If you frequent sites with these types of nags, this process will let you manually dismiss them until they redesign. Ideally they would respect your preferences themselves, but they never do.
A web browser is an inferior tool for the job of accessing reddit API in a mobile context.
Reddit has always been app-first on mobile, web-first on desktop. This has been true since the very first reddit mobile app.
If you're okay using your very inferior solution, then please do not come in here to complain about your willfully chosen inferior experience, because the people here will only seek to help you by educating you on the basic ways to use the reddit service...
I think they meant in the sense that users heavily made use of third party mobile apps, even long before the web site had a usable mobile version. Reddit has always had a dev-friendly API enabling these things.
>No it hasn't, they only released the official reddit app in 2016. Reddit bought alien blue in 2014 but even that was only available on iOS
?? Are you confusing the reddit API with the official crap reddit app? It's okay to be ignorant about reddit, but your fake correction borne out of ignorance is weird and misplaced.
Alien Blue development began when the first official iOS App Store debuted in 2010, and was released shortly there after
The reddit apps for Android came out around the same time frame.
So the reddit apps for iOS/Android came out when the app stores came out. For nearly as long as we've had smartphones, we've had reddit API and third party apps. That's the entire history of reddit mobile: API + third party apps.
Anyone with any knowledge of reddit knows that their strategy for mobile was API+third party apps for the majority of their history, and their recent first party apps are ignored and suck.
"Relay" is also amazing. I realized just today that I browse HN from mobile Firefox, but reddit from Relay, and I realized that that's because Relay is so much better than any HN mobile app. It really makes a difference.
Yes, it's what I currently use, but it has some problems (comment formatting shows up weirdly, the built-in browser uses desktop mode and doesn't let me resize sites so many are illegible, etc). It's the best I've found, though.
Materialistic is nice. The only feature I miss with it would be a custom filter. If I could hide automatically stories based on keywords (like "Facebook"), that would be great.
This gives the old reddit mobile experience, which is far lighter and better. But some things are broken, e.g. "submit" is broken; "parent" take you to the modern mobile version (but "conext" works); "sidebar" needs a separate page.
To any reddit admins reading: please don't take this functionality away.
Their mobile app rarely works for me. There was a bug for a few months(!) where I couldn't log in. It worked again for a month, and now the app can't connect to the server at all.
To be clear, I'm running this on a brand new iPhone X, so I've got plenty of power to run the app. The site works in my mobile browser, but the app has serious reliability problems.
If anyone at Reddit is reading this, please stop pushing the mobile app so hard. You're actively making things worse by pushing a highly unreliable app!
Also, please make it possible to sort by "Rising" on the mobile site and app (should I ever be able to connect again). On busy news days, things move fast enough that "Rising" is the only way to keep up, yet the option is mysteriously inaccessible on mobile.
This should be the top comment. The dark UX forcing an app down your throat for a website is appalling. Also is the chorus of illiterate responsers to every post like this pushing yet another 3rd party app. The website is broken if you need an app.
use the .compact version of reddit's website: append a '/.compact' to the end of a normal reddit url like www.reddit.com/r/programming/.compact , and see how fast and user friendly it is!
Luckily taking 15 seconds to type this in the address bar and load the old version is still faster than loading any "normal" mobile Reddit page. This is what I've been doing for years.
I agree that .compact is their most mobile friendly website but I'm not sure I'd call it "user friendly".
It's difficult to edit comments, difficult to switch between subreddit's, and defaults to their main mobile format or prompts you to download their app if you click on any internal links that don't have .compact in the URL (include the default /r/$subreddit formatting).
They have also periodically been A/B testing a popup with only two options, login or get mobile app, when clicking on a topic -- as far as I could tell it was not possible to just pass to the comment thread. Luckily that seems to have been phased out.
I completely agree and even when you just accept all this and actually get the App, it is pretty terrible (on IOS).
As in, it stops loading posts, and stops infinite scrolling, so you have to basically kill the app, then go back into it.
I don't see how that is more useful than the website or a better experience.
Also another issue is that many links just don't work. I can't see `streamable` and many others because the page that opens has no touch detection. I have to select `...` then go to `Open in Safari` to make it work.
Reddit and YouTube are the only things stopping my IPad from gathering dust.
It's because they want your device's advertiser ID so they can associate it with your interests based on subreddits you visit. There's gold in them ad targeting data hills.
I never download "the app" because I know the privacy and security settings of my browser will not apply there and everything on my phone will get hoovered.
Try i.reddit.com. I still use it, and I'm still annoyed to no end when the "modern" mobile website loads instead, with its ~5 second splash screen that loads less information than the former does in goddamn instant.
I think that's now removed no? Or at least, I haven't noticed it for a while.
I got hit with the Google hammer regarding a similar banner, where they threatened to stop indexing the site completely, so I assume they had a similar message. Or maybe they're large enough to be exempt. I don't know.
It's a small banner on Reddit's AMP pages. Once you click "view more comments", you're taken over to the mobile version which has the huge banner.
Shamless plug: you can see this behaviour in the two screenshots in lower left corner in this post https://grumpy.website/post/0PhBPyfR- Reddit redesigned the AMP page to include some comments, but the behaviour is essentially the same.
You have to be logged in and toggle a preference to disable the popup. But then it forgets I'm logged in and I see it again. I agree that it's extremely obnoxious and has just resulted in me never bothering to look at Reddit on a phone anymore.
I use one of the third party apps. I tried the official app but it forces you to open external links in their embedded chrome/webview. The third party simply opens them in my browser.
