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Comment by mathnmusic | Hacker News Reader

After all the popups, it needs a last one saying "this site works best in our mobile app".

I really hate that about Reddit. I liked browsing discussions on my phone occasionally but the web page kept nagging me into using the app instead. So finally I installed it. But now when googling for information and finding Reddit boards about my topic of interest clicking on „use app“ does not open Reddit app but instead directs me to the stupid App store. Useless! But maybe it’s Apple‘s fault here?

Nope. Deep linking to apps is a solved area. Reddit completely drops the ball on this, and has for years. Their engineering is a complete shambles. The only reason they survive is their market share, not for any reason of 'good experience'

haha clone of my comment at the same time

Great minds think alike ;)

I'm almost tempted to apply for a job at Reddit to see why their engineering is such omnishambles. It's impressive in a way. The only good thing I have to say about it is that they're committed to keeping old.reddit.com alive indefinitely.

Because the team that built old.reddit.com has long since left? And now this is the only artifact they have from an era of decent engineering?

Nope. Decent programmers know how to deeplink into apps, it's completely possible.

That includes the vendor of my third-party Reddit app (Now for Reddit).

If I tap a Reddit link from a page of search results, the link opens in the app.

It's shocking that the devs of the official app don't even bother to do even this bare minimum.

Reddit is by far and away the most mismanaged site with hundreds of millions of users. I wonder what the internal politics are like. The leaks have consistently been pretty bad.

Twitch is a strong contender for this accolade too.

Found a tutorial about deep linking into web apps on iOS. Funny enough, they use the „Redd1t app“ as the prime example …

https://medium.com/wolox/ios-deep-linking-url-scheme-vs-univ...

I wonder about Reddit's redesign. Was it a case of malice - we want to force everyone to download our native apps so we can track the users better, so we made our website as unpleasant to use as humanly possible - or incompetence - we over-hired and had too many frontend engineers and UX people with nothing better to do?

IMHO, it should be there as soon as you arrive on the site and then reappear on every page load.

And if you click past it to remain on the web version, you're presented with truncated lists ("Download App to read the rest!") or a slew of missing features.

I have an old Instagram account that I created over 10 years ago. At the time, I used it for the photo filters. Never cared about the social networking aspect. Just a month ago I logged into it for the first time in forever, and realized I wanted to delete those old posts. Guess what you can't do from the website? Yeah, delete posts. Need the app for that!

Not surprising. Facebook has very strict rate-limiting for deletion of posts, unfollowing of friends, leaving communities, and anything else that can potentially reduce your "engagement". Disabling it on some platforms was just the next step.

I think it was just never implemented. The web page is fairly basic compared to the app, and AFAIK always has been (although I never used it much and haven't had an account in quite a while). Quite a few products are actually app-only now, without even any sort of web or desktop version.

A few years ago I had trouble using the Dutch thuisbezorgd food service, I think it didn't allow me to change my address or something and just kept erroring out. I contacted support and they told me to use the app. I told them I don't have a smartphone. They said I was out of luck.

There are popups? I didn't see any. Must be my malware blocker in action.

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