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 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.
Do people not turn these off? When I get an unwanted notification, I immediately withdraw permissions to send notifications, or even uninstall the app
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
it’s a vpn profile that just intercepts dns requests locally and screens with a hosts file
That's it. That's the whole story. Mobile apps provide more opportunity to spy on the user.
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 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.
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.
> 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 only more companies followed that principle and just left the bloody interfaces alone unless that had a very good reason.
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.