Recall that 3rd party mobile apps came before the official Reddit Mobile app. For many people, especially Reddit’s oldest users, their 3rd party app was Reddit for them.

I would say a good mobile client’s user experience is indeed better than desktop. Desktop websites are second class citizens in this day and age.

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For me I found the new Reddit desktop site completely unusable. I hated everything about it. On desktop I used old.reddit with RES.

On mobile their 1st party app was similarly shitty like their new desktop ui. The 3rd party apps were much better but I didn’t necessarily prefer then over the old+RES desktop website.

Main reason I also used mobile apps was that I could browse Reddit while taking a shit.

Yeah, it was and is a lot easier than desktop usage. I am lying in bed right now typing this with my phone while my desktop is playing YouTube videos. I am too lazy to pick up my keyboard and type this out.

I tried out the Reddit app for a few days during the protests, and it just fucking sucked. It was slow, buggy, and not customizable. Even in dark mode, it was too bright and gaudy for my tastes. And I had to install extra software to disable ads.

I used RiF, which was a bit like a more mature Jerboa with some features like swipe to hide posts, built-in username switching, saving post/comment drafts, and well-done integrations for embedded images and webpage links. Links I click in Jerboa currently appear in my browser history, whereas RiF opened up its own browser. Hopefully, Jerboa will add a WebView option.

More importantly, I felt like Rif was text based, as any Reddit client should be. The Reddit app uses icons where RiF would use a text field. As someone who has put in the time to learn how to read, and used that skill continuously for over two decades, it is annoying to have to freshly learn an app’s specific, increasingly abstract icons when we already have the ability to read text.

I came to Reddit for the in-depth text posts and comments. The meme communities were a nice side thing, but I was really there for the long posts, and to dump long posts of my own.

IMO, the standard Lemmy web app has more features implemented than Jerboa right now. However, I want to keep my Lemmy/Reddit history separate from my ordinary browsing. For both sites, the app allows my browser not to get cluttered with Reddit links. Jerboa currently opens up a canned tab of one of my browsers, but the browser doesn’t get info about every post I open on Lemmy, so it still does have a great deal of utility.

IMO Lemmy is really well designed from the ground up. The web app is pretty good, but I would simply rather not use it in my browser if I don’t have to.

Apparently, Reddit’s app and web interface were additionally inaccessible for blind people to use, so they resorted to 3rd party apps (although I don’t think RiF was one of their typical choices). Reddit has allowed a few select non-commercial accessibility-focused apps to use their API for free, but I think that the status of serving NSFW content to these 3rd party apps is tenuous. The concern was that for all practical purposes, Reddit unilaterally decided that blind people could not interact with NSFW content. Now I just checked /r/gonewild, an established porn sub, and /r/erotic literature, a text-based erotica sub, on RedReader. So far, it is fetching new content for both subs. However, I have not checked any other apps (other than RiF, which is just completely dead) or subs. Anyone with more perspective on the current situation for blind users, please reply.

Lastly, I didn’t moderate any communities on Reddit, but apparently, moderating through the Reddit app or their modern interface sucked. Somehow, the 3rd party apps had much better tools than Reddit’s own app.

For me, RiF was the “frontpage of the internet”. I’ll miss it, but Lemmy has given me hope for the future of the internet for basically the first time in my life. Jerboa is currently the primary way that I access Lemmy, so I am rooting for it’s success, as well the other Lemmy apps and Kbin.

It’s more about the principal to me. Reddit was set apart from other social media because they allowed you to customise the experience so much. They weren’t forcing you towards a “for you page” or “suggested content”, there are no “stories” or “shorts”. My reddit app has looked the same since 2011 and worked the same since. Reddit slowly stopped introducing new features to the api which sucked but it still worked. Killing off 3rd party apps is, for me, the begging of reddit becoming just another social media site that frustrates me.

The main features of the reddit app I used (joey) that I enjoyed:

• More condensed/streamlined interface with less wasted space compared to the official app. Also much faster and more resource efficient with imperceptibly short loading times for text posts.

• Ability to set custom filters to automatically hide posts with a given keyword in the title or subreddit name from my feeds.

• Way better built in image/video viewer compared to the official app.

• Option to move the title bar to the bottom

• Subscribed subreddits shown as tabs in the title bar with the ability to swipe left and right to switch between them.

The feature I miss the most: anytime you opened a post or followed a subreddit link, you could swipe right to instantly go back to where you were like the back button in a browser. So if I clicked on the subreddit name from a post on the frontpage to open r/aww, opened a post in r/aww, and clicked on a link in the comments to open r/illegallysmolcats, I could then swipe right and be back where I was in the comments, swipe right again and be back where I was in r/aww, then swipe right again and be back where I was in the frontpage. And this stacked indefinitely so you could be 15+ subreddit links deep and still go back to where you started in a few swipes.

For browsing while pooping. Or, in Lemmy’s case, browsing while trying not to poop.

I think ultimately it depends on what your use case is. Comparing Apollo to any web version of Reddit, there were already a few use cases which were definitely superior in my view:

• the video / gif player with supports scrubbing by touch.
• packaging comment chains into screenshots to share, with automated features like blurring usernames, selecting depth of parent / child comments to include, merging with post content
• being able to “favourite” a sub without actually subscribing
• hiding posts that you’ve already seen

Ultimately, as with any tool, the best tool is the one you have on you.

I saw a graph earlier today that said something like 80% of American Reddit users access the site via mobile (mobile browser, official app, third party apps). Not everyone has a desktop, but most people nowadays have a smartphone and being able to access the site from absolutely anywhere is a big draw to a lot of people. So that’s the first part of it; there’s a huge demand for mobile access versus desktop access because it’s easier, cheaper and more flexible.

The second part is the fact that the official Reddit app is bullshit. For the average user it’s full of ads and suggestions and not especially easy/enjoyable to use. That’s fine for a large group of people that only browse Reddit occasionally, but if you’re a mod, visually impaired or a heavy Reddit user it’s no good. Third party apps have existed before Reddit even had an official app. You could use Reddit on a much better looking and intuitive interface, with far more mod tools, proper accessibility and absolutely no ads - for free. The difference between using the Reddit app or Apollo (for example) was night and day.

So I don’t think it’s a case of mobile being better than desktop, just that vastly more people prefer to or can only access the internet via their phone. And for that ~80% of users accessing Reddit via mobile, the third party apps blew the official app or mobile browser out of the water.

I’m oldschool, I used old reddit on the desktop, and when I was on my phone, I’d use old reddit, in a browser, desktop site.

Pinch to zoom was the massive feature missing from all the apps. My close vision isn’t quite what it was, so my optimal font size for detail reading is a bit bigger than for headline-skimming - and skimming with large fonts is a horrible experience; the information density goes to shit, and everything is whitespace.

So I want to be able to zoom on text when I want to read in detail, and out again when browsing. And I want it in one seamless gesture that I can change from second to second without having to think about it, not laboriously drilling down into settings menus and completely disrupting the flow. Pinch zoom in the desktop site did precisely what I wanted, and every mobile site or app goes to enormous lengths to disable it :(

I just don’t like any apps very much. They always feel claustrophobic, dumbed down and over-curated, like I’ve got a sales assistant breathing down my neck trying to sell me an experience instead of just letting me loose to browse. Let me see the fucking URL. Let me copy and paste whatever the fuck I want to, using the system facilities. Stop reinventing the wheel with UI and UX. It’s text, images and buttons; we have an app for that, it’s called a browser, and a million times the development you’ll ever be able to muster has gone into getting the interface general-purpose, effective and predictable.

Yes I’m genx, shut up.

Reddit app has ads to click between every few posts. Didn’t see them with the third party apps. Reddit has a premium you can pay to remove the ads but it was far more expensive and IMHO they want the money for themself.

Apps just offer a better experience than a mobile browser, generally speaking (I’m sure there are exceptions though). Also, apps can send push notifications, and third party apps offer more customizations and better features than official apps (again I’m sure there are exceptions though).

Social media sites and their official apps, outside of the fediverse, are too cluttered and annoying. I still remember when Instagram forced video ads to autoplay. I deleted my account and never went back. I really don’t understand how people manage to use this stuff, it’s awful. Ads everywhere, non-chronological timelines, no customization options, tracking scripts/pixels, that slow everything down, it’s terrible.

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Third party apps let you get the benefit of choosing exactly what works best for you and getting a setup you enjoy. Most of the focus by instance admins would be on ensuring everything doesn’t implode and managing fees, but third party apps have a pure focus on usability and dedicate all their resources to making the best experience possible and then the end result is usually way nicer.

This message is being written on a third party app, funny enough! Memmy to be specific.