Recall that 3rd party mobile apps came before the official Reddit Mobile app. For many people, especially Reddit's oldest users, their 3rd party app was Reddit for them.
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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There is a feeling of loyalty. Sync was a mainstay on my phone for close to a decade.
Exactly. On the very rare occasion I needed to hop on desktop, it felt like a totally different place. I didn't use Reddit. I used RiF.
RIF was better than the desktop version. I used old reddit with RES too and I think that was true. 😭
Exactly this. I exclusively used reddit on mobile through Boost, so without it it's like I'm on a different platform.
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I would say a good mobile client’s user experience is indeed better than desktop. Desktop websites are second class citizens in this day and age.
As a mainly desktop user I agree. Nearly everything is designed/built around portrait mode nowadays, and landscape is merely a secondary concern... if at all. Understandable considering a lot of traffic is from mobile, but it can make things feel a bit clunky and fit poorly on a wide screen.
I keep one of my desktop monitors in portrait position at all times now, very rarely do I find myself needing to drag a browser window to the horizontal one. Everything is being designed for portrait mode now.
For me I found the new Reddit desktop site completely unusable. I hated everything about it. On desktop I used old.reddit with RES.
On mobile their 1st party app was similarly shitty like their new desktop ui. The 3rd party apps were much better but I didn't necessarily prefer then over the old+RES desktop website.
Main reason I also used mobile apps was that I could browse Reddit while taking a shit.
The ones for Reddit weren't nearly as buggy as the official one. For example: the video player. The official app's video player was absolute garbage. You would randomly hear audio from other random videos while scrolling, videos would refuse to play, and sometimes you would have to spam the play/pause button repeatedly to get through the video. There were a lot of other buggy aspects to the main app but this was one of the biggest complaints. The 3rd-party apps also had accessibility features which allowed users with disabilities to access Reddit.
The Lemmy web app interface is kinda weird on Lemmy and sometimes certain pages load a bit slow. There isn't much wrong with it though. The 3rd-party apps just feel nicer to use.
Yeah, it was and is a lot easier than desktop usage. I am lying in bed right now typing this with my phone while my desktop is playing YouTube videos. I am too lazy to pick up my keyboard and type this out.
I tried out the Reddit app for a few days during the protests, and it just fucking sucked. It was slow, buggy, and not customizable. Even in dark mode, it was too bright and gaudy for my tastes. And I had to install extra software to disable ads.
I used RiF, which was a bit like a more mature Jerboa with some features like swipe to hide posts, built-in username switching, saving post/comment drafts, and well-done integrations for embedded images and webpage links. Links I click in Jerboa currently appear in my browser history, whereas RiF opened up its own browser. Hopefully, Jerboa will add a WebView option.
More importantly, I felt like Rif was text based, as any Reddit client should be. The Reddit app uses icons where RiF would use a text field. As someone who has put in the time to learn how to read, and used that skill continuously for over two decades, it is annoying to have to freshly learn an app's specific, increasingly abstract icons when we already have the ability to read text.
I came to Reddit for the in-depth text posts and comments. The meme communities were a nice side thing, but I was really there for the long posts, and to dump long posts of my own.
IMO, the standard Lemmy web app has more features implemented than Jerboa right now. However, I want to keep my Lemmy/Reddit history separate from my ordinary browsing. For both sites, the app allows my browser not to get cluttered with Reddit links. Jerboa currently opens up a canned tab of one of my browsers, but the browser doesn't get info about every post I open on Lemmy, so it still does have a great deal of utility.
IMO Lemmy is really well designed from the ground up. The web app is pretty good, but I would simply rather not use it in my browser if I don't have to.
Apparently, Reddit's app and web interface were additionally inaccessible for blind people to use, so they resorted to 3rd party apps (although I don't think RiF was one of their typical choices). Reddit has allowed a few select non-commercial accessibility-focused apps to use their API for free, but I think that the status of serving NSFW content to these 3rd party apps is tenuous. The concern was that for all practical purposes, Reddit unilaterally decided that blind people could not interact with NSFW content. Now I just checked /r/gonewild, an established porn sub, and /r/erotic literature, a text-based erotica sub, on RedReader. So far, it is fetching new content for both subs. However, I have not checked any other apps (other than RiF, which is just completely dead) or subs. Anyone with more perspective on the current situation for blind users, please reply.
Lastly, I didn't moderate any communities on Reddit, but apparently, moderating through the Reddit app or their modern interface sucked. Somehow, the 3rd party apps had much better tools than Reddit's own app.
For me, RiF was the "frontpage of the internet". I'll miss it, but Lemmy has given me hope for the future of the internet for basically the first time in my life. Jerboa is currently the primary way that I access Lemmy, so I am rooting for it's success, as well the other Lemmy apps and Kbin.
The main features of the reddit app I used (joey) that I enjoyed:
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More condensed/streamlined interface with less wasted space compared to the official app. Also much faster and more resource efficient with imperceptibly short loading times for text posts.
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Ability to set custom filters to automatically hide posts with a given keyword in the title or subreddit name from my feeds.
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Way better built in image/video viewer compared to the official app.
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Option to move the title bar to the bottom
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Subscribed subreddits shown as tabs in the title bar with the ability to swipe left and right to switch between them.
The feature I miss the most: anytime you opened a post or followed a subreddit link, you could swipe right to instantly go back to where you were like the back button in a browser. So if I clicked on the subreddit name from a post on the frontpage to open r/aww, opened a post in r/aww, and clicked on a link in the comments to open r/illegallysmolcats, I could then swipe right and be back where I was in the comments, swipe right again and be back where I was in r/aww, then swipe right again and be back where I was in the frontpage. And this stacked indefinitely so you could be 15+ subreddit links deep and still go back to where you started in a few swipes.
Finally a fellow Joey user!
It really surprised me how its user base was so small. Highly customizable and really good overall. I used RIF for years, but something was lacking and I kept searching for alternatives. When I tried Joey, I never looked back.
What is interesting, tho, is that it is somehow still working. The dev is inactive on Reddit for weeks, but made a couple "bug fixes" on GitHub the last few weeks.
It's more about the principal to me. Reddit was set apart from other social media because they allowed you to customise the experience so much. They weren't forcing you towards a "for you page" or "suggested content", there are no "stories" or "shorts". My reddit app has looked the same since 2011 and worked the same since. Reddit slowly stopped introducing new features to the api which sucked but it still worked. Killing off 3rd party apps is, for me, the begging of reddit becoming just another social media site that frustrates me.
For browsing while pooping. Or, in Lemmy's case, browsing while trying not to poop.
I'm oldschool, I used old reddit on the desktop, and when I was on my phone, I'd use old reddit, in a browser, desktop site.
Pinch to zoom was the massive feature missing from all the apps. My close vision isn't quite what it was, so my optimal font size for detail reading is a bit bigger than for headline-skimming - and skimming with large fonts is a horrible experience; the information density goes to shit, and everything is whitespace.
So I want to be able to zoom on text when I want to read in detail, and out again when browsing. And I want it in one seamless gesture that I can change from second to second without having to think about it, not laboriously drilling down into settings menus and completely disrupting the flow. Pinch zoom in the desktop site did precisely what I wanted, and every mobile site or app goes to enormous lengths to disable it :(
I just don't like any apps very much. They always feel claustrophobic, dumbed down and over-curated, like I've got a sales assistant breathing down my neck trying to sell me an experience instead of just letting me loose to browse. Let me see the fucking URL. Let me copy and paste whatever the fuck I want to, using the system facilities. Stop reinventing the wheel with UI and UX. It's text, images and buttons; we have an app for that, it's called a browser, and a million times the development you'll ever be able to muster has gone into getting the interface general-purpose, effective and predictable.
Yes I'm genx, shut up.
I think ultimately it depends on what your use case is. Comparing Apollo to any web version of Reddit, there were already a few use cases which were definitely superior in my view:
- the video / gif player with supports scrubbing by touch.
- packaging comment chains into screenshots to share, with automated features like blurring usernames, selecting depth of parent / child comments to include, merging with post content
- being able to "favourite" a sub without actually subscribing
- hiding posts that you've already seen
Ultimately, as with any tool, the best tool is the one you have on you.
Thank you, this is the type of answer I'm looking for.
The first and last points are hitting me so hard right now, even just one day after Apollo's demise. Being able to scrub through a video or GIF was so incredibly useful. You could pause it by holding your finger still, then move back and forth by swiping left or right, even frame by frame if you wanted. I miss that more than I thought I would.
Also, hiding posts I've already seen (or scrolled past) was another lifesaver. One thing I notice on Lemmy (I'm simultaneously testing Mlem, Memmy and wefwef) is that I keep seeing the same posts over and over. Every few hours I open an app to my home page, and scroll through the same few dozen posts that are popular that day, only seeing something new between every five or six familiar posts. Apollo never showed me the same post twice unless I specifically bookmarked it. Much less wasted time.
Hiding posts is something I sorely miss, I'm on Android btw and testing several apps.
i don’t have a solution yet for the media playback. Mainly because I don’t seem to have stumbled upon many gifs / videos on Lemmy yet.
However for the stale posts issue, I’ve found sorting by new or new comments seem to be the best way to get fresh posts. I’ve also put in a feature request for the hide read posts feature to the Wefwef dev. Hopefully they get a chance soon to consider it!
That's a good point! I admit I avoided sorting by "new" on Reddit just because of the sheer amount of garbage that was posted, especially in popular subreddits. But this is a whole new community and that's definitely less of a problem. I'll give it a shot, thanks!
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I saw a graph earlier today that said something like 80% of American Reddit users access the site via mobile (mobile browser, official app, third party apps). Not everyone has a desktop, but most people nowadays have a smartphone and being able to access the site from absolutely anywhere is a big draw to a lot of people. So that’s the first part of it; there’s a huge demand for mobile access versus desktop access because it’s easier, cheaper and more flexible.
The second part is the fact that the official Reddit app is bullshit. For the average user it’s full of ads and suggestions and not especially easy/enjoyable to use. That’s fine for a large group of people that only browse Reddit occasionally, but if you’re a mod, visually impaired or a heavy Reddit user it’s no good. Third party apps have existed before Reddit even had an official app. You could use Reddit on a much better looking and intuitive interface, with far more mod tools, proper accessibility and absolutely no ads - for free. The difference between using the Reddit app or Apollo (for example) was night and day.
So I don’t think it’s a case of mobile being better than desktop, just that vastly more people prefer to or can only access the internet via their phone. And for that ~80% of users accessing Reddit via mobile, the third party apps blew the official app or mobile browser out of the water.
Apps just offer a better experience than a mobile browser, generally speaking (I’m sure there are exceptions though). Also, apps can send push notifications, and third party apps offer more customizations and better features than official apps (again I’m sure there are exceptions though).
Social media sites and their official apps, outside of the fediverse, are too cluttered and annoying. I still remember when Instagram forced video ads to autoplay. I deleted my account and never went back. I really don’t understand how people manage to use this stuff, it’s awful. Ads everywhere, non-chronological timelines, no customization options, tracking scripts/pixels, that slow everything down, it’s terrible.
Reddit app has ads to click between every few posts. Didn’t see them with the third party apps. Reddit has a premium you can pay to remove the ads but it was far more expensive and IMHO they want the money for themself.
Third party apps let you get the benefit of choosing exactly what works best for you and getting a setup you enjoy. Most of the focus by instance admins would be on ensuring everything doesn't implode and managing fees, but third party apps have a pure focus on usability and dedicate all their resources to making the best experience possible and then the end result is usually way nicer.
This message is being written on a third party app, funny enough! Memmy to be specific.
A lot of people use reddit/Lemmy on the transit to work/school/university, and on mobile the official reddit app stinks, especially the video player. Other then that third party apps provide a lot of customisation, for example filters and different displays methods. What you see on desktop is a card view by default and list view when using the old website or compact view, on for example "boost for reddit" you could have cards, list, gallery and swap views. You could have a different view and filters set for each sub, set it so when you save the post it automatically up votes it and much more.
Basically it was mostly because people like to have something personal, customised perfectly to thier needs and wants while the official reddit apps just didn't provide enough.
This is it for me. I reddited on the train, while waiting for the bus, while on break at work, and yes, while ruling my kingdom (it's okay, I have a waterproof phone, I just wash it when I wash my hands).
I use firefox as my main browser on low end phone, so any complex webapps (both lemmy and reddit) is not that great. That is why I use apps, it feels more responsive when using apps.
For pooping.
The Lemmy web on mobile is actually surprisingly good. I'm building a addon that's emulating the slide out community (sub) picker from RIF and it's pretty dang familiar.
For me, I am on my mobile 90% of the time, though I am at my desktop a lot of that time as well. But I use my desktop mostly for gaming and work purposes. My mobile is where most my entertainment and web stuff happens. (￣ω￣;)
Web interfaces on mobile stink most of the time. Let's be honest. And Reddit's was bad. Even old.reddit.com looked bad on mobile.
My favorite 3rd party app for Reddit was Joey. And why I loved it was that it was a simple and intuitive interface that made browsing reddit fun. Like other 3rd part apps, Joey had a menu screen you opened to see your list of subscribed subreddits, but it also had tabbed subreddits where I could scroll over from one subreddit I was viewing to another. It was a really nice interface.
It also made reddit much more accessible for mobile users like myself which when compared to the atrocious 1st party reddit app... It was a night and day difference. Joey was quick, it was fast, it was intuitive, when their were bugs they were immediately fixed. Where as the official reddit app was slow, it was buggy, when 3 bugs were fixed, 12 new ones always cropped up immediately after. I never saw that with Joey.
Lemmy is kinda along these same lines. The web interface on desktop is fine, but on mobile, it stinks. So developers of all sorts including former 3rd partyreddit app developers (Sync for Reddit) are getting in on developing apps for Lemmy because they want to create a better mobile experience.
Currently I am using Jerboa since I like it the most, and it is the most feature rich at the moment. But I am testing and trying out other Lemmy apps to find any others that will be a better fit down the line.
On Boost for Reddit my home feed is only subreddits I've subscribed to. On the desktop and official app, it's that new bastardized version of my subscribed subreddits and all.
I could save searches, I felt like it allowed me to view Reddit the way I wanted to view it. I don't want to see half of the meme lords on all in my home feed.
Most people don’t have a desktop nowadays, so there’s that. Apps were needed because the website has never been formatted well for phones and tablets.
and it's getting even worse. My bet is they will forbid all mobile browser connections with a giant fucking modal plastered with "USE THE MOBILE APP" and unable to even use mobile browsers. Enshittification and such
Relay for reddit would convert and download any video or image automatically. It was better with media.
It didn't nag me all the time like mobile web reddit did.
Mobile apps tend to be smoother experiences that web browsers. Swiping shortcuts and other things. Also, can't being my desktop to the pooper.
Mobile apps for any service allow said service feel more native to the mobile device it is running on.
For instance, UI wise, it’s like a desktop browser UI vs a mobile browser UI.
Sure, you could have a desktop UI on mobile, but it wouldn’t look good, and wouldn’t adapt to the screen size to make things easy.
I moved most of my daily computing over to a smart phone about a decade ago. I use a computer for work and a computer for gaming, moving the rest of my computing to a phone helps the brain. Reddits app sucked, their site doesn’t work well on mobile and constantly forced to open in the app. Third party was my only option, Apollo.
I’m using Wefwef (really don’t love the name) which is a clone of Apollo for lemmy. It isn’t as feature-rich at the moment but the interface is similar enough to make the transition easy.
I'm a desktop browser user as well. I can understand the draw to phone apps, but I only use mobile where I have to. I'm actually pretty old so I grew up on desktop and laptop PCs. Never been drawn to using mobile apps for much. I do have a proper Android phone and the only app I installed on it myself is Zoom though it came with a bunch and there's a few others I use once in while.
Anyway mobile apps do a better job presenting content on the limited screen real estate of a phone or tablet. Though if you wanted you could access Lemmy from a mobile browser. It's just not optimized for mobile and can actually be kind of painful. People have published website apps for desktop browser, but really there's not much reason to use one. You get optimal presentation on desktop browser natively.
It’s just easy to use and when you simplify forums to be used on mobile you get a lot more engagement compared to 15 years ago.
Since I have two toddlers at home my time on the desktop is quite limited.
However I can easily check my phone while I'm keeping an eye on them
On Boost for Reddit my home feed is only subreddits I've subscribed to. On the desktop and official app, it's that new bastardized version of my subscribed subreddits and all.
I could save searches, I felt like it allowed me to view Reddit the way I wanted to view it. I don't want to see half of the meme lords on all in my home feed.
Being a desktop-only user puts you in a rare minority these days. I have worked for a lot of large sites and in general, audiences have been mostly mobile for many years, as in more than 50% access on their phones. In 2023 it’s more like 80%, maybe evenly split between app and mobile website. With desktop in slow decline. Apologies to desktop folks, I’m not saying you don’t exist or don’t matter. Just that you are special and becoming a rarer breed as time goes on.
So most of the talk is between mobile web and mobile app, while desktop goes fairly unnoticed. This is likely why you are hearing so much chatter about apps. If you don’t even use your phone, it would probably be hard to explain the subtle differences between using a phone website and a nice native app.
I believe that, but I really don't get it. I have a phone like everyone else, and I'll use it when I'm out and about, but when I'm at home, having a proper mouse and keyboard and a large screen is just a way better experience.
I have better things to do when I'm at home than hop on social media. I really only used reddit when I didn't have anything better to do.
I just spent an hour keeping an eye on my kids while they played outside. A desktop / laptop computer just isn’t an option for many lifestyles. And as phones have taken over and gotten more expensive, fewer people are willing to spend $1000 on a computer anymore because they’re already paying $1000 for a phone. I’m not sure I always agree that desktop is a better experience, either. Mobile interfaces tend to be lean and focused. My password manager integrates more easily on my phone than elsewhere. Push notifications are often helpful to have. To each his own but I wouldn’t assume desktop is objectively better all the time.
I've always used the browser, both on mobile and desktop. I tried several different apps but none of them supported tabs, so I couldn't browse reddit the way I was used to and I quickly uninstalled all of them.
Plus, I couldn't find anything wrong with using reddit in a browser. I was on old.reddit with RES when I was using my laptop and on the .compact version on mobile (until it was recently discontinued).
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