Comment by ihuman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ihuman | Hacker News Reader

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.

Looks like the classical:

* 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)

But lots of people got to feel important along the way and that's what matters

Managers gotta get paid yo

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'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.

It's a problem with Alien Blue, not imgur. It just needs to enable cookies across webviews.

Is this new then? It only started recently.

> It just needs to enable cookies across webviews.

'just' enable something that has an impact on user privacy?

They'll know you visited the site before? Why would I want to lose functionality to mitigate against that?

Seems like a perfectly good thing to have as an app-wide setting tbh.

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.

Haven't installed it yet--but are you saying that photos show full size in the feed vs. just a thumbnail requiring a click? Sounds like new ad formats are on the way...

I'm sure they are but I like not having to click every time I want to see a picture.

Its an option. They default to a full size "card" , but you can make it more like the reddit websites traditional "compact" view. For the front page, press the button in the top-right to access the setting. For every other page, it is an option in the settings.

> I used the quick swipe left to collapse comment threads 100s of times a day

Same, though I found the "skip to next parent" button on the lower right was a good substitute.

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.

I'm curious to see what happens!

This new app got released minutes ago. It's not going to be perfect out of the gate. Give it some time.

This app is not a one-week MVP of a side project released by a developer with zero resources.

It is, however, an app with legitimate substitutes, so an incumbent must be equal or significantly greater.

I hope there continue to be legitimate substitutes. I still remember when Twitter decided to add the key limit to their API shortly after releasing their official mobile clients, for the sake of "maintaining a consistent user experience" or something like that.

>shortly after releasing their official mobile clients

???

The definition of MVP doesn't really depend on how big the development team is.

On android, 'reddit is fun' is great. Because of it I was never wanting for an official app and I knew that whatever they released officially wasn't going to be that good. Not out of the gate anyways. So far the release of the official app has just been mildly inconvenient for me, 'reddit is fun' had to be slightly renamed and the icon changed. But whatever.

I wasn't expecting it to immediately have every single feature that AlienBlue had. With the amount of time they had been working on it (and the number of developers working on it), I was expecting it to have at least half of them.

Why not make AlienBlue the official reddit app? They bought it! This is a very strange course of action.

This is one of "Things You Should Never Do" http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

Well it was the official app before this one. Considering how good AB is I think there's some technical reason to redo the app. Who knows.

AB was developed by one person (who is still on the app team) - it's possible AB isn't suited to having a team work on it, or they want to follow new best practices (eg. Swift)

My guess: AlienBlue was developed with power users in mind and this new app was developed with showing people ads in mind.

A major re-design gives them the excuse to remove and never re-add many features and tune the app for a different type of user and a different type of interaction.

Inserting ads into the Alien Blue feed would have been easy. You may be right about the different target user, though.

It used to be that we developed, tested and polished software before releasing it. Does anyone else miss those days?

"Those days" never really existed. Software has always been buggy.

Yes, there have always been (and always will be) software bugs, but it was at least intended to be used as shipped. We didn't release software with the stated intention of "ship it now, we'll patch bugs and finish features later."

If you replace an existing app with a new one the new one better be at least as good and feature-complete as the old one. Remember that you can never take away features once they have been rolled out.

Of course you can take them away. If you don't you become Microsoft.

Jase has done VERY little work on the new app as far as I know. Pretty much all new devs.

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

Version 1.0

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