Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexis | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

Your failure here is not that you are not making it available, but that you failed to communicate this limit in ability.

The flow for me was "hey neat", click link to reddit page, "ok, this looks good", click link to google play store, click green Install button, 'none of your devices are compatible', "what in the ever-loving ...?", go to hn comments, "oh goddamn, not again".

That could've been MUCH shorter and MUCH less confusing if the title up here ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11447273 ) said: "Announcing Reddit for iOS and Android in NA/UK/AUS" and at the very least having a text below the appstore/playstore buttons stating this.

Have some empathy please.

Edit: Going "Hello World!" in the "What's New" section also doesn't help matters.

https://twitter.com/reddit/status/718067681438539778

"Reddit anywhere with our app for iPhone & Android"

Replies are filled with people from countries where they can't get it.

Wow, "anywhere" makes it actively worse.

I remember Google doing the same thing when they launched their "Chromebooks are for everyone" ad campaign - you could only purchase one in the UK or the US.

It's like companies are actively trying to annoy the region's they geo-block.

No, it's like what's actually true - that they don't think about those places and therefore do things like write slogans with the mindset that such people don't exist.

Even more likely: whoever wrote that copy isn't the same person as whoever decided on the geo-locking policy.

Google still loves doing this with Chromebooks. They have human-translated marketing websites for the Pixel in Norway and their buy button is just greyed out.

Additionally, it's highly unlikely that potential users will bother continuously checking to determine if the restriction on their region has yet been lifted - given that they can continue to use the competition. Tomorrow I will have forgotten about this app.

This should have been sorted out before the launch.

Yep. Was going to try this app, but can't. Don't think I'll ever bother again, I'm happy with Relay for Reddit after all.

That is until they pull a Twitter and kill those clients.

They claim they are committed to supporting that free API[1]. And if they kill it, it would also kill all those reddit bots. There would be a massive outrage since many large subreddits rely on them for advanced automated moderation. There's AutoMod which they've integrated, but it's often not enough.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/4dqxgt/reddi...

Or they could just limit it to 10 IPs per API key. Kills all 3rd party clients, but leaves bots.

If anyone can sign up for a bot API key, then anyone can sign up for a 3rd party client API key. It'd add a step or two, but still.

Anyway, you don't need an API key at all currently. And they said they intend to support the current API.

That’s what they said about Twitter, too.

And suddenly Falcon Pro was limited to 100'000 users.

Query. Is the borking of RSS feeds last couple months related? It was done so poorly(still borked despite assurances contrary)? Would be quite a convenient way to herd a bunch of RSS users to sign up PDQ to keep their TIL & ELI5 fetishes uninterupted.

I'm afraid I did the opposite, however. I don't need a new app, and again contrarily, I don't need a new feed reader. My worthless trivia supeepowers are indeed in decline. Meh.

Can you share what is involved with this effort? It would be educational to the HackerNews community that is (understandably) quite angry at this decision. You can turn this into an educational effort on the state of app distribution.

Frankly, I have a hard time believing that your team couldn't have done this due diligence upfront, considering how rare it is that I encounter apps in my daily use that do not work seamlessly. I moved from North America to Europe 1 year ago, so this is something I have a lot of experience with. You could help me and others understand this better.

I'm sorry, but as an occasional iOS developer, and seeing the amount of Portuguese users you guys have on Reddit, I find it hard to take that at face value. Is it the localised blurb you need? Crowdsource it.

Heck, I'll do it. Ping me.

Could you expand on what diligence is required?

It probably has to do with advertising. The purpose of this app is to monetize the mobile users and they can't make money off users in countries where the ads can't be shown (for whatever reason).

Yeah it's weird. They used this word again in the official announcement thread so clearly they've got a position they want their employees (and Alexis) to take, a fantastically vague corporate one at that.

"Launching apps in other countries requires a little bit more diligence than just making a website available globally"

could you expand on this?

Why is that? Is it related to the crypto export restrictions in the Apple App Store?

New Zealand is a state of Australia, so if you could enable it here too that would be great.

If you rolled it out to Oz surely you can enable New Zealand to ???

Australia, but not New Zealand? C'mon.

what are the chances of getting a stripped down interface that just says "title, subreddit, comment count, upvotes" in one line (maybe 2)?

No colors or upvote buttons, or toolbars. maybe a single button (not a hamburger, probably an arrow) that presents all the menu options.

swipe to collapse comments is also a pretty crucial feature.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com