from Hacker News

Reddit gets its app to 50m Play Store downloads

by arbhassan on 9/3/20, 8:01 AM with 52 comments

  • by jchw on 9/3/20, 8:16 AM

    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.

  • by rayalez on 9/3/20, 8:45 AM

    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).

  • by mikkom on 9/3/20, 8:34 AM

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

    http://i.reddit.com

  • by threatofrain on 9/3/20, 8:17 AM

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

  • by varbhat on 9/3/20, 8:33 AM

  • by swarnie_ on 9/3/20, 8:30 AM

    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.

  • by emptyfile on 9/3/20, 9:07 AM

    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.

  • by laurencei on 9/3/20, 9:07 AM

    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.

  • by drivingmenuts on 9/3/20, 11:37 AM

    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.

  • by mrbonner on 9/3/20, 4:07 PM

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

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

  • by gnicholas on 9/3/20, 9:16 AM

    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.

  • by mcintyre1994 on 9/3/20, 9:05 AM

    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.

  • by r721 on 9/3/20, 9:19 AM

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

  • by arbhassan on 9/3/20, 9:53 AM

    Seems like this post got shadowbanned. It doesn't appear on the front page nor the second or third. while posts with way less points and comment activity are visible. Also the title got changed from the original one.