Because 3rd Party apps don;t tend to show the ads, so they really want you to get used to the official app and not be tempted away, would be my guess.
Ask HN: Why is Reddit on mobile so obsessed with making me use their app?
411–420 of 657 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is Reddit on mobile so obsessed with making me use their app?
#412It is pretty offensive that they say "reddit works better on the app" when the only reason for that is that they broke everything on mobile (on purpose?) in a series of badly-implemented redesigns. I'm never going to install it, and I have all but stopped reading it because these prompts are so obnoxious. That's probably +$ for Reddit though. I don't understand why companies constantly do stuff that serves only _them…
MIT economists Acemoglu and Robinson wrote a book "Why Nations Fail" that analyzes why countries at similar starting points can have extremely divergent paths in terms of economic development. One example is South and North Korea. Their conclusion is that some countries have established extractive institutions, while others inclusive . The extractive ones exclude the population from the decision making process and se…
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Re: Ask HN: Why is Reddit on mobile so obsessed with making me use their app?
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe Apple is going to be allowing push notifications from the web soon, and you can also "Add to Homescreen" a webpage, and it acts like an app, so we might finally be seeing a needed shift away from the app store.
Apple added push notifications to safari, but only on desktop. That tells you that they deliberately do not support this because they know a lot of apps could be pwa’s otherwise.
Last I heard is that it is also coming to mobile.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Reddit on mobile so obsessed with making me use their app?
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
They also keep adding new stupid in-app notifications (I have OS notifications blocked for them) which ironically you have to use the website to disable. "Trending" stuff in subreddits you're not even in and suggested subreddits and garbage like that. I assume that rubbish does become an OS notification if you let them.
Those kind of “nagifications” are among my biggest pet peeves on the modern internet. Almost every social platform these days abuses the notifications icon to show you a bunch of not-actually-a-notification garbage to boost your engagement. LinkedIn is especially egregious in this regard.
Someone actually installed a LinkedIn mobile app?
May I ask why?
Re: Ask HN: Why is Reddit on mobile so obsessed with making me use their app?
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still use old.reddit.com. Such an improved experience, even on mobile where the format doesn’t fit. So maybe that’s why they want you in the app? They know their website is terrible?
At least for firefox, there's an old reddit redirect extension that automatically rewrites any reddit urls to old.reddit. I warmly recommend that one. Except that since the latest firefox mobile release it hasn't yet been ported. But given that it does exist on the desktop version, I guess it's only a matter of time until it reappears for mobile firefox as well.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Reddit on mobile so obsessed with making me use their app?
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apollo is definitely the best (as in, it's so feature complete, stable, integhrated with the OS UI/UX and awesome I don't see any reason why anyone would want to use an alternative) but there are alternative's, for example Narwhal.
Narwhal is criminally underrated. It's so fast and fluid, and you always have access to subreddits by swiping from the right. Apollo is good, but Narwhal deserves more love IMO.
My only complaint about it is it doesn’t use WKWebView, but something else to render web content. This means that any site I open in Narwhal does not use my content blockers and is thus an ad and tracker infested slow as molasses experience.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Reddit on mobile so obsessed with making me use their app?
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
Android support for browser notifications landed in Chrome mobile about five years ago. (And yes, that included support for Android versions that were old even then.) iOS still has no support, and nothing even on the horizon, as far as I know. Apple is intentionally holding back the open web. I find this infuriating.
I will somewhat reluctantly support Apple on this. There are no web sites that I want to allow interrupting my work/writing flow with notifications. Also, the new awesome privacy settings in Safari on the beta iOS and beta iPadOS and beta macOS Bug Sur are very much appreciated, at least by me.
They support web notifications in safari in the desktop. Whatever annoyances would be caused on mobile are also present there. I am convinced the only reason we don’t have push notifications on mobile safari is because it would enable people to write pwa’s instead of apps.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Reddit on mobile so obsessed with making me use their app?
#418As a conversion optimization question, I suspect Reddit would get better conversion on their "do you want the mobile app" banner if they only showed it randomly about 10-15% of the time. By showing it every time, they cause viewers to remember their "why would I want that - I don't" decision from the previous time they saw the question. Reducing the frequency would likely result in more people considering the questio…
I learned from working in marketing is you have to let go of your biases and assumptions about user behavior. In the beginning I found myself constantly thinking "why would anyone in their right mind click on this ad", but we know people click on ads. Most of us in tech are very different from your typical internet user at large.
We have to assume that smart people are working at Reddit, that they have tested the living crap out of this model, and have found it to be optimal.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Reddit on mobile so obsessed with making me use their app?
#419All the business reasons:
- on desktop adblockers are prevelant. On mobile not.
- on desktop you can't send push notifications thus keeping engagement up.
- Getting into the habit of using mobile apps gets engagement up.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Reddit on mobile so obsessed with making me use their app?
#420Other people are saying "ads," but the story is probably more expansive. Mobile apps have better hooks for pulling people back into the app, like popup notifications. Reddit has natural lifecycle points where they can do this: when people respond to your comments or comment on your posts. They could also notify users of events like their yearly Secret Santa. I wouldn't be surprised if their engagement numbers were mu…
Would there be confounding variables though? Users who have the app are anyways likely to be the ones who use Reddit more so naturally it has much higher engagement than on a browser.
Yes! And as a general rule, it's safe to assume their marketing department isn't interested in that issue. Marketing departments can't help but market themselves too, and if BS numbers make them look good even to the detriment of the company, it's almost a sure bet you'll see them do that.