With the purchase of AlienBlue over a year ago, I had high expectations for an official Reddit app. Seeing how hyped Jase (the developer behind AlienBlue) was about this app, I was expecting a less buggy version of AB with more features. Instead, what we got was a reddit app with less features. Here are my main issues with it:
1. No moderator support. With AlienBlue, we could read all of the Mod Mail, and remove posts, With Reddit.app, I can read some of my mod mail (some message chains are missing), and I can't remove anything.
2. No Comment flairs
3. Can't see which posts I've read already
4. The in-app browser isn't as good as the older AlienBlue one, and doesn't have an optimized view for imgur/direct links
5. No casual/favorite subreddit groups
6. Most of the settings in AlienBlue are not in Reddit.app
7. No swiping gestures except for swiping from the left edge to go back.
Commenters in /r/AlienBlue found more issues with it than what I've found so far. While I have hope for the future of Reddit.app, I'll be sticking with AlienBlue for now.
The Imgur bit is troubling. Even in AlienBlue I've noticed that when an image starts defaulting to the Standard Imgur view, and I click "Optimized", it switches right back to Standard. I'm not sure if that is Imgur intentionally trying to prevent people from not seeing their "Download our app" banners everywhere, or a bug in AB, but it is very annoying.
Ultimately, when I see an image or video thumbnail on Reddit, I don't want anything else with it. I want a direct image/video link. Ideally they'd be part of the native experience and not need to punt me elsewhere. There's really no reason Reddit shouldn't fully own those experiences beyond perhaps wanting to save on hosting/processing.
I'm also troubled by the increase of ads appearing in the feed vs. elsewhere. They are clearly watching Facebook and Twitter closely with their push towards a more curated algorithmic feed that allows for more/better ad insertion, vs. focusing on giving users more control of the feed.
I agree with a lot of your points, especially comment flair and swiping gestures (I used the quick swipe left to collapse comment threads 100s of times a day). I'm not a mod so I never used those features of Alien Blue.
However, I like the organization of the app more. Pictures are automatically displayed in the feed and require no clicks (gif/gyf support is badly needed, though), it has infinite scrolling, and there are essentially two browse sections: one for the front page and the other for browsing individual subreddits. It's nice to be able to switch to a specific subreddit and then go back to the front page exactly where you were.
It also seems faster than Alien Blue. With AB I would encounter "dead" links that wouldn't load many times a day, and I haven't seen one with the new app. Pages and images load much quicker than AB.
I'm switching to the new app and hope they add new features soon.
I'm guessing Alien Blue, as great as it is (I paid for it years ago!), was built on a foundation in need of major refactoring.
They probably made the call that many of us think about doing - though we rarely do it - of throwing everything out and starting from scratch, building from the ground up with all the past lessons learned.
If so, I think the ultimate measure of their success will be speed of iteration.
Even if it doesn't include everything alien blue has today in, say, 6 months, it will likely introduce plenty of other nice features, and for many users will be either a wash or nicer and more stable.
it seems reddit has always been disconnected from a proper mobile experience.
both of their mobile versions of the site have been abyssmal, i'm not surprised the app sucks too
It's an app for Reddit. Go figure. I'll be sticking with Sync (Android), which doesn't have this bewildering region restriction, has tons of features and faithfully follows Material.
Countries can lean on Google and Apple and say "Get this app out of my country." We are rolling out one by one so that we can stay on top of the content reports. Reddit has a lot of potentially controversial content and countries have various levels of sensitivity to that. It would be counter productive to go global now, get banned in a bunch of places, and then have to fight protracted battles in a bunch of different places to get back into those stores. See: Secret in Brazil.
We're now available in the US, Canada, UK, and Australia. Launching apps in other countries requires a little bit more diligence than just making a website available globally.
I'm sorry it's not available in your country -- we're planning on getting it out everywhere.
In addition to the other problems raised, it's frustrating that while Reddit itself continues to be open source [1] with significant contributions from the open source community [2], neither of these new apps are (and with no signs of that changing).
My favorite part of this app is how they only released it in three countries, because nothing says "front page of the internet more" than a good ol' geo-lock.
This was explained in the original announcement thread. It'd be easy for a bunch of countries to turn round to Apple/Google and say "we don't want this app in our country", especially given the... breadth of Reddit's content. They're rolling out slowly to reduce the amount of firefighting they have to do.
I think I now know why Reddit was so generous with all of the Gold. The app, although very fast and responsive on iOS, lacks many of the features that Alien Blue had. I could find zero integrations with any third party services. The cool thing about Alien Blue is, if I was a stoplight and didn't have time to read a linked article, I'd just add it to Pinboard and get back to it later.
Another major failing - there isn't an option to always open links in your browser of choice. At least use a Safari View Controller, for pete's sake.
EDIT: It looks like I can choose to share a link with the ... menu option. I can then share to my Pinner "Quick Save" option to save to Pinboard. Not sure how I missed it.
They were generous with the gold because they're probably going to shut AlienBlue down. AB doesn't have any ads, they can't make money off those users.
The official Reddit app for Android is pretty feature poor so far. It only offers a default theme and a dark theme. It only offers a default layout and a compact layout. No customization beyond that. No option to always view links in external browser and Imgur links aren't opened in the Imgur app (etc for other sites).
It's nice that they've finally released an official app, but to use this instead of Bacon Reader / Relay / Slide / Reddit is Fun / etc would be a large step back in functionality.
Not sure. Today, I was installing all your mentioned Reddit clients and deinstalling them right afterwards. While the first impression is good and they seem to offer lots of features they lack one important thing (at least the free versions)—to save a sub in a favorite list which is easy to access. Something which is essential and they don't offer it or hide it away in the paid version. Something btw which the Now Reddit client on Android does for free. I think another Reddit client is definitely no breaking news but that the existing ones are so much superior? Not really.
How are 3rd party Reddit apps on the security front? If I login through Antenna, is there any way to guarantee that they don't have full access to my Reddit identity and credentials? Or is that the risk of going with them?
I believe that if you look at this moment a year from now, it will be a major inflection point, bringing reddit to a much larger audience.
We're all tech savvy on this site and may not mind monkeying with the previous third-party apps, but there's a much wider audience that will be willing to use a well-supported first-party app.
The problem is no one really uses apps anymore. Especially to view a website when you already have a mobile app that does that for you (your browser). This feature is 3 years too late in my mind to be a needle mover.
I don't use Reddit actively anymore (just when a link leads me to the site) but the last time used it actively and even today when I have to access the site on mobile my favourite app is Reddit Is Fun.[1]
Its free version[2] is as good. I just bought paid one[2] to support the fantastic app. They also have the source code of an old version[4] available online, though the app's current source is not open sourced I think.
Most likely yes. This seems to be the Twitter approach all over again. Although you'd think the failings of that would be pretty obvious from a strategic standpoint, particularly for someone with as much business-savvy as Sam. So odds are they either have an idea for how to do it differently, or they think their platform is so much better and entrenched than Twitter that the same bad strategy could still be successful for them.
Yeah, after trying all the apps on iOS I prefer Narwhal the most. I'm not sure why. It's similar to Reddit is fun in terms of the subreddit list which why I guess I like it. The other apps seem to not make it easier to manage your multis or subreddits.
I am disappointed in the Android client so far. There are several very featureful alternatives such as Relay.
I don't think it is a bad thing for Reddit to offer a free, bare minimum client. But after the Twitter experience I hope we don't see a gradual exclusion of the competition.
The last progressive web thread on HN mentioned this app for HN: https://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/ and I love it. Does anyone know of something similar for Reddit?
No-one has mentioned it here but this app appears to me to be an important milestone for Reddit. They're now hosting content themselves. An announcement in /r/modnews tells mods to whitelist Reddit's new image hosting domain.
It's not browser based, but they definitely used a loose interpretation of Google's Material Design. What stands out to me most is their Card design and use of icons in the drawer layout.
Looks great on iOS, but the feature set is lacking. I'll probably stick to using Antenna for now. Good to see they haven't just been ignoring Alien Blue for no reason, though.
Reddit is one of my most used website. I am preferring many subs over established forums, eg r/apple, r/ipad over Macrumors, sometimes r/programming over HN, very often r/javascript and so on.
I welcome Reddit's new native clients. Who knows, maybe we see soon some more and significant innovations than just being another Reddit client which employs the standard API.
I just wish they would serve the mobile site on the same domain. It's way too much work to modify the URL to get to the mobile site. I don't want to need an app to read news.
Reddit is penalized on HN (sorry for the shock), but this is obviously real news, so we've taken off the penalty and restored a few hours of clock time to this post.
Interesting! Is that a hard-coded penalty or is there some sort of calculated weighted penalty per-domain based on some criteria? If the former, is it just due to mod experience of poor-quality/just link submissions?
I thought the whole point of not doing mobile apps themselves was because it's a waste of engineering time since there's a massive community that will do the work for them. I would much rather see them focus on making the site better.
ihuman|10 years ago
1. No moderator support. With AlienBlue, we could read all of the Mod Mail, and remove posts, With Reddit.app, I can read some of my mod mail (some message chains are missing), and I can't remove anything.
2. No Comment flairs
3. Can't see which posts I've read already
4. The in-app browser isn't as good as the older AlienBlue one, and doesn't have an optimized view for imgur/direct links
5. No casual/favorite subreddit groups
6. Most of the settings in AlienBlue are not in Reddit.app
7. No swiping gestures except for swiping from the left edge to go back.
Commenters in /r/AlienBlue found more issues with it than what I've found so far. While I have hope for the future of Reddit.app, I'll be sticking with AlienBlue for now.
eloisant|10 years ago
* Developer makes a great app so they acqui-hire him
* For the next app they want to do it "their way" so they have managers and marketing people telling him and other devs what to do
* The resulting app is the same that if they had done it from scratch without the acqui-hire (but with one less competitor)
shostack|10 years ago
Ultimately, when I see an image or video thumbnail on Reddit, I don't want anything else with it. I want a direct image/video link. Ideally they'd be part of the native experience and not need to punt me elsewhere. There's really no reason Reddit shouldn't fully own those experiences beyond perhaps wanting to save on hosting/processing.
I'm also troubled by the increase of ads appearing in the feed vs. elsewhere. They are clearly watching Facebook and Twitter closely with their push towards a more curated algorithmic feed that allows for more/better ad insertion, vs. focusing on giving users more control of the feed.
robwilliams|10 years ago
However, I like the organization of the app more. Pictures are automatically displayed in the feed and require no clicks (gif/gyf support is badly needed, though), it has infinite scrolling, and there are essentially two browse sections: one for the front page and the other for browsing individual subreddits. It's nice to be able to switch to a specific subreddit and then go back to the front page exactly where you were.
It also seems faster than Alien Blue. With AB I would encounter "dead" links that wouldn't load many times a day, and I haven't seen one with the new app. Pages and images load much quicker than AB.
I'm switching to the new app and hope they add new features soon.
karmelapple|10 years ago
They probably made the call that many of us think about doing - though we rarely do it - of throwing everything out and starting from scratch, building from the ground up with all the past lessons learned.
If so, I think the ultimate measure of their success will be speed of iteration.
Even if it doesn't include everything alien blue has today in, say, 6 months, it will likely introduce plenty of other nice features, and for many users will be either a wash or nicer and more stable.
I'm curious to see what happens!
morley|10 years ago
bmeckel|10 years ago
HemanHeartYou|10 years ago
perseusprime11|10 years ago
zamalek|10 years ago
It's an app for Reddit. Go figure. I'll be sticking with Sync (Android), which doesn't have this bewildering region restriction, has tons of features and faithfully follows Material.
alexcharlie|10 years ago
alexis|10 years ago
I'm sorry it's not available in your country -- we're planning on getting it out everywhere.
Inversechi|10 years ago
Sir_Cmpwn|10 years ago
[1] https://github.com/reddit/reddit
[2] https://github.com/reddit/reddit/graphs/contributors
bsimpson|10 years ago
https://github.com/reddit/reddit-mobile
ilyanep|10 years ago
ywecur|10 years ago
jedrek|10 years ago
quarterto|10 years ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/4dqxgt/reddi...
asd|10 years ago
Another major failing - there isn't an option to always open links in your browser of choice. At least use a Safari View Controller, for pete's sake.
EDIT: It looks like I can choose to share a link with the ... menu option. I can then share to my Pinner "Quick Save" option to save to Pinboard. Not sure how I missed it.
jbob2000|10 years ago
basch|10 years ago
jscheel|10 years ago
skrowl|10 years ago
It's nice that they've finally released an official app, but to use this instead of Bacon Reader / Relay / Slide / Reddit is Fun / etc would be a large step back in functionality.
greenspot|10 years ago
minimaxir|10 years ago
The big feature omission is no iPad support, which I am legitimately curious why they would leave that out.
If you are looking for a iOS Reddit client, I strongly recommend Antenna, which is amazing on an iPad as well due to Split View.
shostack|10 years ago
spdustin|10 years ago
samstave|10 years ago
compumike|10 years ago
We're all tech savvy on this site and may not mind monkeying with the previous third-party apps, but there's a much wider audience that will be willing to use a well-supported first-party app.
ProAm|10 years ago
balladeer|10 years ago
Its free version[2] is as good. I just bought paid one[2] to support the fantastic app. They also have the source code of an old version[4] available online, though the app's current source is not open sourced I think.
I like this app for its:
- Simplicity
- Speed
- No nonsense approach to serving content
[1] https://www.talklittle.com/reddit-is-fun/
[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andrewshu....
[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andrewshu....
[4] https://github.com/talklittle/reddit-is-fun
sschueller|10 years ago
Is the end goal to take control of mobile and close down the API so they can shove ads down peoples throats?
It didn't work out well for twitter...
shostack|10 years ago
robwilliams|10 years ago
tma-1|10 years ago
norea-armozel|10 years ago
shirro|10 years ago
I don't think it is a bad thing for Reddit to offer a free, bare minimum client. But after the Twitter experience I hope we don't see a gradual exclusion of the competition.
verganileonardo|10 years ago
jcastro|10 years ago
ihuman|10 years ago
cheeaun|10 years ago
boyce|10 years ago
This is probably not good news for imgur.
https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/4drl3j/moderators_...
kevindeasis|10 years ago
Is there any tutorial/documentation on how to design beautiful websites like that.Asides from looking at the source: https://www.reddit.com/mobile/site/style.css
mindstreamer|10 years ago
booop|10 years ago
Maybe in a few months we'll end up with one damn fine app.
On a sidenote, one obviously bad thing is the overuse of referral URLs and tracking redirects for every link.
zeveb|10 years ago
I've no confidence that this won't be some sort of half-assed browser-based app which doesn't follow Android's conventions.
DDickson|10 years ago
CardenB|10 years ago
rcarmo|10 years ago
This sort of thing happens time and again when someone fails to click the right options when publishing an app (typically in the US) :)
greenspot|10 years ago
I welcome Reddit's new native clients. Who knows, maybe we see soon some more and significant innovations than just being another Reddit client which employs the standard API.
alexis|10 years ago
Meet some of the folks behind it and hear how we're thinking about it: https://youtu.be/6IWMbdAuy1M
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