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Comment by worldmerge | Hacker News Reader

They have also made many of the subreddits not viewable via a mobile browser pushing you to the app, it seems though the blocks go in and out of effect. At some point metrics of a sites app downloads don't mean anything when they make their primary site unusable.

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I deleted an unofficial Reddit app from my phone, since I found I was wasting too much time on it. I figured for the occasions I wanted access to reddit (mostly from searching for topics on Google), I’d just use the web version.

But the web UI, combined with Google AMP, made it unusable.

I’ve gone back to the app but with iOS screen time restrictions.

Apollo for Reddit is a great app made by a solo dev!

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apollo-for-reddit/id979274575

That is until they become even more greedy and ban third party apps. Probably by the end of next year. The reasons will be 'privacy of users' and 'letting users access reddit via a unified interface'. Or some bs like that

As an ad-supported service, I wouldn’t be surprised if Reddit refuse to serve clients that don’t show ads. On the other hand, I don’t think their API that Apollo is using includes ads. Same deal with third-party Twitter clients. I wonder if their are examples of similar ad-supported services that included ads in the API, and required the developer of the third-party client to implement ad support?

Reddit should make an API feature to allow the 3rd party app, the ability to display the ads. Then, Reddit will do profit sharing of each ad shown. This would give the 3rd party app incentive to maintain the app.

Why would they do that when they could just fully control access with their app and not have to worry about ensuring other clients show ads?

I've found you can google the subreddits, and they will show you these subreddits. As long as your referrer is still Google, it seems to be fine.

Shouldn't Google punish this in the results? A fake website that wants search traffic but doesn't want to operate as an actual website...

But it's good for google, isn't it? I mean, if ddg can't get me there, but google can, then it makes google better than their competitors (in the one regard).

Because you're viewing it as an amp site. As long as you try to do anything it forwards you to the real site and you're back to square one.

What’s an example of this?

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