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Comment by jmknoll | Hacker News Reader

Reddit has really degraded their mobile web experience over the past year or so. I can’t view this link at all on mobile, it just has a dialog with options to open the app or return to the Reddit homepage.

View on HN

For anyone on iOS, Apollo is really essential if you want to use Reddit. Especially now with safari extensions, you can just set Reddit links to automatically open in Apollo.

Agreed! Apollo is great (but I’m biased, see below.)

I lived with Apollo’s dev for 3 months ~a decade ago and can say he was a super friendly, genuine guy and a was great roommate. Best of the ~500 people that came through our hacker house. Seems to really care about his users, too.

So for all of Reddit’s dark patterns and anti user behavior it seems that he’ll do right by users.

Really happy to see HN sending support for his product.

Happy Apollo user here.

Do you know of a way that this can be done with Firefox on iOS?

Thanks, but no thanks. I am not installing an app just to view a website. I have a browser.

I'm the same way, but I finally gave in and tried Apollo. It's really well made and unrestricting. Would highly recommend it, even though I no longer need it, as I've switched to a freedom respecting distribution of Android.

lol so true. Apps are actually inferior for the user these days. Example: I can easily skip YouTube ads on the mobile YouTube website, so I use that. Can’t skip ads on the YouTube iOS app.

One of the worst parts of reddit apps are that you don't have browser history anymore so you can never find anything again.

Many apps, but not all.

I am there for 9/10 cases, but needing to have a browser session logged in to Reddit at all times so that it defaults to old.reddit.com is pretty obnoxious on mobile. Apollo also surfaces far more functionality with far more immediacy than I can normally be bothered to interact with in a (mobile especially) browser session. I’m actually using the Hack app by Pranoy Chowdhury for Hacker News for many of the same reasons.

The web experience has been reduced to an indexer. Following the HN link, there's an option to open the app store, or navigate to the subreddit's index. Even choosing to navigate to the index and open a post directly displays the same prompt.

The only way I have found to prevent the behavior is to log in and set a preference not to be prompted

Same. Couldn’t view the link and won’t be installing an app I have no intention of using.

Try prefixing "old":

https://old.reddit.com/r/SM64PC/comments/q3nm9f/sm64_has_bee...

there is also the i.reddit.com prefix. Sometimes the old.reddit.com interface can make titles very large, and body text (and links) very tiny, on mobile. I can only assume this was intentional, as it happened when the new UI was introduced.

This started happening in the past month for me with Firefox on Android. It turned out that it was due to some sort of Accessibility / font resizing setting - disabling that setting caused it to use the correct font sizes again (and apparently, has a large performance and battery life benefit as well).

While this is quite interesting, I've moved on these days. It's clear that my manner of use is not desired, so I'd rather not set myself up for disappointment when I arrive at the inevitable outcome.

I do appreciate you commenting though, because I sure wondered what was going on!

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