I wonder why they don't just buy one of the highest rated apps (boost/sync/apollo), and go with it?
See Apollo as an example. You have a single dev, with very fine apple ios ecosystem knowledge, who always adds the latest apple api's and listens to community feedback and makes the best app, he alone can make in whatever way serves him to learn new coding skills and community requested features.
On the other hand on Reddit official app, you have tons of product managers forcing developers to work on many features that are outright against community feedback. See things like reducing information load, or making ads indistinguishable from content. Those features benefit reddit but many users hate them,
Apollo has dense vs wide posts and no ads. Official reddit app doesn't.
The value proposition and the audience they are catering too is very different. Buying the app is not gonna fix the fundamentally opposite goals of both apps. Reddit has fantastic devs, I can be 100% sure of that. it also wasted months of their time making some fake reddit nft side proyect that was dead on arrival.
I understand their focus is on users downloading the app, but this is just sloppy poor craftsmanship.
Firefox on Android with no extensions.
I refuse to, and I will abandon reddit when 3rd party apps stop working.
Still buggy as hell, but they are improving it.
Only when that crap can be turned off it will be as good or better than a year ago.
It's not sloppy or poor craftsmanship, it's intentional.
I’m effect, I guess what you and others are saying is that it doesn’t matter if Reddit has good devs or bad, they are going to put out a terrible product.
This is what it looks like when I click on a post: https://i.imgur.com/wqNAofO.png
This is on an iPhone 14, iOS 16.
Side-by-side comparison (i.reddit.com on the right): https://old.reddit.com/r/redditmobile/comments/7kaqgb/could_...
Did you miss the part where it took them years to get a functional video player and it's still the worst one you'll likely ever use?
If reddit puts two juniors working on the video player and then has half the team working on making the stupid profile pictures for users that is not an issue of developer talent.
I have 0 doubt that there are really good devs at reddit, and I am also sure they are being made to work on monetisation shit and not on fixing mod tools, video player, bot detection and power user options which would make the app 1000% times better
For their Customers they will. Their customers are ad agencies.
What they will never make a good product is for its users because the goals of reddit the company and the userbase are opposed.
Maybe they do have fantastic devs, but it sure don't show in what users interact with.
The customers, ad agencies, are being listened to and their feature requests are implemented.
Imagine a user like a cow, the person deciding is the human who eats the burger, the cow does not decide how big its house is. Similarly users on reddit do not choose the app layout for their convenience, ad suppliers do.
Just on the tech side, the mobile client is not Reddit's bread-and-butter, it's their servers handling traffic, resiliency, recommendation algorithm, spam filtering among many others.
Not that it's simple to run a site this popular, but it's a lot less complicated than many other social media sites.
If you downloaded Alien Blue on an old device, you can still use it today, because the standalone Reddit app is a separate application in the app store altogether.
I'm pretty sure they bought the audience. Reddit did not have an app before this, and Alien Blue was by far the most popular one. It was subsequently abandoned and that's how Apollo was born. Even Apollo doesn't have some of the features that Alien Blue had.
a new competitor will arise to fill that void. some jaded user writes something better, at no cost to the company, inspired by what once was and what could be - the virtuous cycle of growth begins anew.
…oh right, that would require non-cost-prohibitive third party access.
welp…
But everything they do now is to try and force arbitrary engagement metrics and this will only drive users away. Contrary to popular belief users don't like bubbles.
Reddit bought Alien Blue. Sure, it's got ads and other bullshit, but the core UX is the same. I've never had it crash or cause any problems. I've always been confused by what people mean when they utterly trash on the "official reddit app". Is there another one I'm not aware of?