This is false. I only browse reddit in the browser version on my phone. It annoys you all the time to install their app, but you can read and post perfectly fine.
Your rebuttal is false and the parent is accurate. Reddit will throw up a full screen interstitial on most popular subreddits preventing even viewing and redirect you to download the app. This is on the mobile (not old.reddit desktop-only) site. Their UX is shite and full of dark patterns.
If you log in, the mobile site is perfectly usable. You might also have to set a preference as well (like the old.reddit preference). It has been so many years of using it this way I don't remember.
You can on old.reddit.com. Their redesign was so unpopular with users they agreed to keep supporting the old design which doesn't nag you into downloading the app.
And I can guarantee that there are approximately five people using Reddit via a browser on mobile. Mobile means the app, to a precision of two or three significant digits.
As one of the five, I didn't believe this so went trying to determine more realistic numbers.
Per the link below, mobile web is anywhere from 15 to 60% of mobile traffic. Reddit isn't listed, and it's 4 years old, so who knows, but I'd imagine it falls somewhere in the same range, probably closer to the lower end?
I'd wager you're completely wrong. Reddit at this point gets a ton of traffic from search. Remember the old 90/9/1 rule. 90% of users are just browsing cat pictures and are eyeball fodder for ads.
old.reddit is starting to come apart at the seams, tho. (maybe it's because r/subs don't keep the style sheets up to date or something? i dunno) in many cases you can't up or downvote, there's no search button, there's no sidebar with the flair and the rules/mods, etc.
I used "style sheet" in a generic sense, rather than to mean CSS (I remember Microsoft (Multitool) Word v1.0) and I was referring to the layout of a subreddit home page which I've never played with but I'm aware the moderators have some control over.
I know how to turn off Page Style in Firefox (manually for every page) which is CSS related, but otherwise have no idea what you are referring to
I am one of the five. I use the Reddit website on iOS Safari and have for years. I only read one subreddit, so my usage pattern may be different than a normal reddit user. The only thing that annoys me is the ever persistent ‘website or app’ modal dialogue but I’m used to it now.
I try to use mobile websites instead of apps because I feel like the tracking data a company can get from a web browser is less granular than app tracking data.
I'd wager that most Reddit users these days, casual or not, are only dimly aware that the platform even exists as a website. Or at least a large plurality.
According to [1], Reddit has 52 million daily active users (and 430 monthly users), while according to [2] the Reddit app has 17 million daily active users. Both numbers are from 2021. So only about a third of DAUs would be using the Reddit app. Apollo has 50,000 yearly subscribers, so is probably more on the negligible side.
> Apollo has 50,000 yearly subscribers, so is probably more on the negligible side overall.
Note this figure does not include free users, nor the users of the plethora of other clients... But regardless
Clearly, Reddit has deemed 3rd party clients pose a huge cost to their platform, otherwise they wouldn't charge through the roof. IMO, all these numbers are meaningless given this fact.
I’m not sure what Reddit’s rationale is here. Third-party app users are less than 1% (can’t find the link where I read this). The most plausible explanation is that they want to get rid of a potential future threat, because I don’t believe that current third-party usage constitutes any substantial loss. Otherwise buying out Apollo as mentioned in TFA should have been an easy decision.
Wouldn’t an ad support guideline be enough for third party apps to continue coexisting with the official Reddit app?
Call it that, or sdk. But if ad based revenue is so important for Reddit, getting Apollo and the rest to properly display and track ads is imho a no brainer and would totally solve the issue at hand.
As I said maybe I am too naive, and I only see part of the picture.
We’ve got lots of web devs and startup space folks on this site, I guess somebody must know how to look this sort of thing up?
I googled “percentage of reddit mobile traffic in app” but got a bunch of marketing sites, and wasn’t able to sort out which ones were bullshit. I bet there’s a good source for this sort of thing though.
In any case, we don’t need to wager right? It seems like this ought to be measurable.
