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I personally stop browsing Reddit and Twitter when their fuck-you-banners appear. I have accounts with both, but installing the app or logging in is usually more friction than accessing the content is worth.

... So thanks for keeping my periods of distraction very short! Maybe they just care about their users' mental health and are sacrificing their engagement for it :)

The default Reddit web site on desktop is excruciating enough to use. On mobile it's unusable. I only use old.reddit.com. If that ever went away I would never visit Reddit again.

Might be worth checking out libredirect [1] which I use on desktop and mobile to automatically redirect reddit links to privacy-respecting front-ends like libreddit and teddit. Also since I have it on my default browser on Android, even if I open a reddit link from, say, a hackernews app, the popup webview will use my default browser which will in turn automatically redirect to libreddit/teddit. I never have to worry about seeing reddit's annoying web app, never have to worry about giving reddit my data.

(old.reddit.com still does give reddit data, and from my experience Reddit does a lot of tracking IPs + working with google + traffic correlation to figure out what stuff you browse. However if you still prefer old reddit, libredirect does provide an option to automatically redirect to old.reddit.com instead of libreddit or teddit)

[1]: https://github.com/libredirect/libredirect

Apollo on iOS is great if you’re looking for a Reddit app that doesn’t suck. Not sure if you’re on iOS though.

>I personally stop browsing Reddit and Twitter when their fuck-you-banners appears

That's what https://old.reddit.com is for. Simply prepending "old." to the reddit link makes everything work better.

Works on mobile and desktop, just as it always had.

And no fuck-you banners.

There's also https://i.reddit.com/ for mobile devices.

My Reddit usage has basically plummeted to 0 at this point because of their pushing me towards an app.

I think there are provable cases where an app almost certainly leads to less retention than more and something like Reddit, whose value lies in allowing you to explore the internet is almost certainly one of them.

I really can't understand why Reddit is pushing the app so hard. I mean, keep that as an option, but why creating an awful UX for the mobile web users? You gather more data but the product is worse, less users are staying and you're losing value at the end...

You drive high ad revenue with their mobile app, with all the data mining. The old reddit experience was destroyed to drive ad revenue, they don’t care about UX.

also, beware of reddit URLs bouncing through out.reddit.com — which tracks all link clicks on reddit across mobile and desktop (profiling interests), regardless of login state

Push notifications. Once someone is hooked on the site a notification can get them back into the dopamine feedback loop very easily. I think this is why restaurant chains have started giving people free food to install their apps too (along with all the data they can sell now.)

I think smartphones would be much less popular if people understood why corporations love "apps" so much. It's nothing like the older PC world full of software more or less for its own sake.

> Push notifications.

Do people not turn these off? When I get an unwanted notification, I immediately withdraw permissions to send notifications, or even uninstall the app

If your on HN you're already in a very filtered group that is less likely to be passive on abusive technology.

bold of you to assume that the average user knows how to disable anything on their phone

Kind of scary to imagine the experience of such an average user. "Evil" is not a bad word to describe the attitudes of such apps and services.

I suppose you need to have some idea of how the system is structured to even consider turning certain "features" off.

> You gather more data

That's it. That's the whole story. Mobile apps provide more opportunity to spy on the user.

Easy, harder for users to block the ads in apps. Apple / Google should allow add blockers for the entire OS.

It is possible with SNI blocking to adblock on Android, even when apps use custom DNS revolvers (though not as effective). I built https://github.com/jawline/Puffer a while ago but haven't had the time to improve it much past proof of concept.

Heh, Google adding ad blockers.... I think you might be on the wrong timeline.

i use this on ios: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id691121579?pt=425087...

it’s a vpn profile that just intercepts dns requests locally and screens with a hosts file

Pihole works well here but obviously not end user friendly.

Series F funding. They don't know how to run lean and make themselves profitable so they run a grift on investors and sweet talk them with stories about high value data collection.

Increased engagement and better tracking.

Best thing reddit did to break my use of them:

1/ New UI, forcing people on to old.reddit.com 2/ Mobile pushes HARD for their app, which is pretty buggy on Android from what I can tell 3/ old.reddit.com now shows "other links" midway down the page! Absolutely useless. 4/ old.reddit.com now forces "show more comments"

This is why people left digg to go to reddit. :-)

All I want is the old reddit interface in the middle, feel free to place ads on the right. I even went reddit gold or whatever it was called for a while. I really miss the old reddit UI, there is so much good tech information on reddit for random things, that it's a shame.

> My Reddit usage has basically plummeted to 0 at this point because of their pushing me towards an app.

My phone can't even work all that well with apps like that or Chrome browser/WebView for that matter. I use Opera on my phone because they allow me to have 50-100 tabs open with no issues, but maybe that's only passable because I never do anything important like banking on the phone anyways.

So, whenever I'm coerced into installing an app for actually browsing content, reading comments, looking at media (vs something more one-off like ordering food/a ride), I just look the other way. Ergo, I never use Reddit on my phone without spoofing the user agent or whatever the "request desktop site" option in Opera does, but then the UI becomes unusable on a phone.

Sadly, cases like mine don't show up in any metrics, nor do people care about that use case, so it's likely that this will keep being done a lot.

You can also use i.reddit.com or old.reddit.com, they're both mich better than the regular site and i.reddit.com is adapted to mobile.

Check out the "Apollo" reddit app. Its a 3rd party app for Reddit. I've started using it and would never go back to the native Reddit app. No ads, very fast, constant updates etc.

I wish I knew why they're pushing the app so hard so I can specifically avoid doing that. If they want you to just have any app installed they'd win even if you install Apollo.

> If they want you to just have any app installed they'd win even if you install Apollo.

Sorry but this just isn't true. They want the app for the tracking, push notifications, etc. Apollo doesn't have the tracking and does it's own push notifications (so you don't get Reddit's marketing-type notifications). Also it's much harder, if not impossible, to block ads in an app vs the web. Apollo has zero ads, they absolutely don't want you using it, even the web is better for Reddit. It's only a matter of time before they "Twitter" up their API even more than they already do. There are multiple things (stats, polls, certain profile features) that they don't expose through their API.

Does Apollo use their official apis won’t they just deprecate those like Twitter did?

Yep, that’s why I said this:

> It's only a matter of time before they "Twitter" up their API even more than they already do.

When that happens I imagine I’ll fall off of Reddit. “old.reddit.com” and Apollo are the only reasons it’s bearable to use other than a Google search destination.

There is and will be for years if not decades a ton of important/useful information on reddit. Things like cooking tips, home server building, relatively unbiased product reviews, video game help, and the list goes on. A good portion of that content is evergreen. But as for participating, I won’t go back to the official app after using Apollo, even if that means leaving Reddit after over a decade.

If you don't require authenticated functionality:

https://r.nf/

https://github.com/spikecodes/libreddit

https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit

If reddit ever gets rid of old.reddit.com, that is the day that I stop using it.

I think a lot of mods use it, and that's why they don't get rid of it - since reddit mods basically work for Reddit for free.

I'm still shook that the i.reddit.com interface still works and is virtually unchanged for over 10 years now!

If only more companies followed that principle and just left the bloody interfaces alone unless that had a very good reason.

I agree that Reddit pushes too hard to get people to use the mobile app.

I found a good trick was to use AN app, just not their app. Apollo on iOS and Boost on android are really good alternatives to the official Reddit app, which is littered with ads.

Reddit optimizes for user attention to sell ads. The mobile app is better at delivering that attention across the user base, even if a few users don't like it. Same thing with Quora and many others.

You say unverified, but I’m pretty sure there’s lots of verification for this. Obviously it will depend on the service or app, but it’s a well known trend.

At my previous job our app had much higher retention than our web product, despite the web product being much more mature, modern, and feature rich. We verified this across multiple marketing channels, and looked at long term user retention over years.

Could it be that the mobile interface was simply better in terms of speed, usability, smoothness of the UX? Complex web apps honestly often look and feel shite in the browser.

Nah, people retain on mobile apps because they have a simple icon to use to get there. It’s extra effort to remember the name of the service and write down the address.

Push notifications are really powerful for creating habits as well.

Potentially, but aren't those essentially properties of native apps? When we say that apps retain users better it's not some magic, it's because of apps typically having better UX, whether that's speed/features, device integration, or the "UX" of being right there on the home screen.

How do you know that people use the app because they are already highly committed to the service, rather than the other way around? IE, the whole thing is a selection effect?

We were a logged-in only service, and measured that users acquired on the app who never used the website were typically retained longer than users acquired on the web who never used the app.

We certainly did encourage users acquired on the web to download the app, and the fact that those who did were retained longer could have been a selection effect, but I don't think this accounts for users who never saw the other platform.

Why are you calling it an unverified myth? In reality there are petabytes generated everyday proving the efficacy of mobile apps vs websites. This has been tested and measured in pretty much every possible way at this point with 100s of billions in ad spend.

It's not just real estate on the screen, it's faster on-device processing with lower latency, rich offline abilities, better and more persistent access to more API's from notifications to storage, stronger identity with durable logins, and of course better analytics tracking.

It's not always the correct choice but native apps are the overall winner for mobile UX.

Having petabytes of stats doesn't mean the interpretation of those stats is any good. The retention for your web app might suck, for example, because you're constantly showing popups to the users telling them to switch to the mobile app and once they leave you no longer see them in "the data".

The problem with data is that you can't see the things that are real but not in the data.

Qualitative data can be valuable data, even in this quantitative age.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_Bias

More often then not, the front end devs responsible for the app are not very good with "normal" web frontends - so they sabotage the competition, to reduce work. Also, web pages, could be repackaged into Apps by others leeching from the products attention.

Its typical to have a different set of engineers responsible for the web app. Certainly the case if you're not a tiny startup.

Sabotage feels pointless given you're still competing against other native apps. Also I don't even know how you would 'sabotage' the competition, your average app engineer doesn't moonlight as a blackhat hacker.

A lot of people I know will simply not use a service if the only way to do so is through an app, due to the dumpster fire that is security and privacy in apps. I understand that such people are a small percentage of the population, but I really do sometimes wonder if companies are even aware that they have a pool of potential customers that they've excluded from even trying their product out.

They are, but they're also aware of the effort vs return on dealing with a "small percentage of the population" as you admit. Sometimes its worth it, often it isn't.

Except that it literally takes more effort to exclude them than it does to not do so. Bolt is the prime example here: they already have a working web app, and they go out of their way to block people from using it instead of the smartphone app, seemingly only in locales where they believe most people have smartphones. Why? What does that accomplish?

It'd be understandable if the smartphone apps came first and the developers decided a web app wasn't worth it, but a lot of these smartphone-app-only developers use PhoneGap and other tools wherein one already has to write a web app.

This thread is about web vs apps in general. I don't know why Bolt does what they do, but generally it's a lot of effort to maintain both interfaces for mobile users, often with entirely different teams, frameworks, language stacks, deployment models and more just to end up in the same place.

Like I said: it's understandable when it's actually a native mobile app. It's far less understandable when it's something like Uber or Facebook or Reddit that's very obviously just an HTML/CSS/JS site in a "native app" wrapper.

Uber and Facebook are not HTML apps in a wrapper.

Ah, right, forgot that Facebook invented React Native... in which case my point still stands, since one of the very selling points of React Native is to use the same code for both "native" and web.

There’s probably more people who won’t use something on their phone if there isn’t an app for it. If it’s for a bigger activity. Not that either population is that big.

But in the context of Bolt, I believe they aren't displaying ads in their app?

My reply was against mobile app retention being a myth. I don't know the reasons for Bolt but it's unlikely to do with ads.

Sometimes it looks like designers are using this without any kind of thought. A page in my country, that is used for managing appointments with medical specialists forces user to install it, to read some messages (mostly automated) from this facilities. After installation it tries to remind user that it's there by pushing notifications about it's existence, like anyone is going to be like "I'm bored, I'll check all local urologists and maybe make an appointment with one, just for fun"

This is a weird take, and I highly doubt retention is the primary reason they choose to limit the use of their web interface. In fact, I’m generally suspect of the hand-wavy speculation that some less savvy business unit made a decision in isolation. The two drivers that I would expect are: reducing friction and native compute capabilities.

People generally gravitate towards the path of least resistance, which is something you already see companies exploiting with things like unfavorable privacy settings defaults. Having an app is another instance of that. There is much less mental friction in pushing a button on a home screen compared to opening a browser, punching in a URL, possibly having to log in, etc.

Given that this is rideshare, this is important, because the services offered by other companies are effectively identical. If someone has Uber installed, they would be much more likely to go the path of least resistance — using the installed app — as opposed to going out of their way to use an equivalent offering.

Additionally, there are problems in mapping that would be very difficult, if not impossible, to solve in a browser. For example: localization (precise positioning) would be incredibly difficult without a native library, you wouldn’t be able to do any offline re-routing, like gmaps does, among other limitations.

> There's an (unverified) myth that retention on mobile apps is better. This is one of those things that marketing people keep telling each other without ever verifying the facts. (Unless you deliberately make the web version inferior, of course.)

I own a platform with native apps + web, and I can confirm that retention on mobile apps is better, by the numbers. I'm not comparable to Bolt though, neither in the business model or the number of users.

How much of a delta? Does it justify having mobile?

The worst part of this is how the Mobile Web experience is actively hampered on iOS by Apple. When web apps on mobile do have a worse experience for me, it is often due to Safari. This is especially frustrating because the average consumer blames the website for the poor experience and doesn't understand Apple is at fault.

> Deception works momentarily and can have an immediate effect on some metrics. Long term though, every user and no matter how smart or dumb, will eventually assess the value it gets them against the money, against their time, or against the "home screen real estate" they provided.

This doesn't apply to Bolt nor any of their competitors. They all work off VC money subsidizing rides and once the VC money dries up users will flock to the next competitor that's being VC-subsidized. This will happen much quicker than the users wisen up to the abuse.

> Deception works momentarily and can have an immediate effect on some metrics. Long terms though, every user and no matter how smart or dumb, will eventually assess the value it gets them against the money, against their time, or against the "home screen real estate" they provided.

Long term hardly matters for most these days, they're optimizing for $ and promotions as mercenaries. That metric bump will get the PM promoted where they'll jump ship to the next company and juice the app metrics the same.

Exactly. Short terms tricks are often also used right before a funding round or acquisition.

People on HN are not idiots. Users, in a broad sense, are. There are people searching for wordle in the app store for Christ's sake.

This is ridiculous. Why they assume that I'm picking because I saw them on screen? I'm picking them because of price and service quality. People from marketing voodoo...

I don’t think it’s really about retention, but rather the value of the richer data set you can gather on your users.