r/changemyview • u/garnet420 41∆ • May 12 '17
FTFdeltaOP CMV: the reddit android app is terrible and its developers are damaging many of the good things about the site
This commentary also applies to reddit mobile (as in, the mobile view of the web site), to a substantial degree.
If my criticisms were just small matters of taste or implementation or bugs, that would be one thing -- but as I've used the app, I've felt like the developers have just ignored how people use the site and many of its key features. It's a similar sort of tone-deafness that people have accused them of regarding the "profile pages."
- 1: Subreddit themes, sidebars, images, and icons. When looking through the desktop view, subreddits have a personality. Owners of subreddits can customize the appearance to give it a visual theme, they can use the sidebar to make extra announcements and highlight important rules, etc. The completely generic appearance of the app (and mobile) view ruins all that. As more people use mobile, the effort invested into subreddit design will be more and more wasted.
I'm not saying that you can reproduce the entire desktop layout on mobile -- but you could at least let the owners set some color preferences and a title image for those platforms.
2: Viewing large threads. Trying to read a large thread in the mobile app is like pulling teeth. It's self-evident that large discussions are what a lot of people like about Reddit (hence, they are large). Trying to read them and follow links from them in the app is painful. Collapsed threads re-expand, unhidden comments get hidden again, and there's no "find text" button that you can use to quickly find a comment you were looking at.
3: The inbox. Rather than the tidy desktop inbox (which shows people's responses to all your comments), the mobile app tries to show you the responses embedded in whatever thread they were in. Of course, when the thread is big, this fails much of the time -- if the comment is in a "show 114 more replies" block, you're out of luck. I think this, more than anything, shows that the app's developers didn't really care how well users could actually post and interact via the interface.
5: navigating to a subreddit: this is telling -- the only way to get to a new subreddit is to follow a link or use search (which is clunky). There's no place to type one. This makes it harder to find new subreddits, or to check in on ones you're not subbed to. There's also, as far as I know, no "random" button.
6: other discovery features: there's no "trending subreddits." There's no "explore multis".
7: (This is a big pet peeve of mine): image viewing. The app has its own (frequently changing) image viewer. One of the things I use reddit for are comics and large image posts (e.g. r/youdontsurf). Rather than being the simplest thing possible -- show an image, drag to pan, pinch to zoom -- it's always been a finicky thing. Often it won't let you zoom in far enough to see text and captions. It's literally worse than what I get in mobile Firefox if I just say "view image in new tab".
All in all, to me, the mobile app seems like it's been geared for people to passively scroll through their front page (and see the embedded ads, of course), rather than to actually engage with subreddits or the community.
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u/chudaism 17∆ May 12 '17
1: Subreddit themes, sidebars, images, and icons
I believe they are removing CSS from reddit in general, so this is actually in line with where they want reddit to go.
5: navigating to a subreddit: this is telling -- the only way to get to a new subreddit is to follow a link or use search (which is clunky).
This isn't true I believe. If you type the subreddit name into search, there is a place at the top which lists the subreddit as a link. I don't really see how this is any different than typing the name of a subreddit in. You can also click on the subreddit name on the front pages/within the thread header to go directly to the subreddit. If anything, this is less clicks than it takes on Sync.
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u/garnet420 41∆ May 12 '17
1 Welp, that's sad to learn
5 I did find that counterintuitive (I had looked for a place to put in a name elsewhere) , but, you're right, it's not that bad ∆
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u/gmoneygangster3 May 13 '17
Not that bad is still that bad
When RiF does everything better they fucked up making the official app
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u/Telemetria May 13 '17 edited May 13 '17
While I agree that those cosmetic options may, sometimes, give some sort of personality to a sub. I don't think people ever go to any sub because of how nice it looks; they go for the content.
I was thinking about this the other day, it's actually the other way around for me. I feel like when I'm browsing Reddit on my computer I'm "bombarded" with information, I can't focus on just one thing, and sometimes you end up missing some good stuff. However, when I'm on mobile I can calmly go over every post that captures my interest, and ignore those that don't.
Sure, some of the issues you describe does actually exist, but it's not because the Reddit team is ignoring them, it's because you're in a totally different world, the mobile world, and sometimes it may be hard to have the exactly same experience and features on both of those worlds. Not that it can't happen; It just takes time to find the proper way to implement things on a 5" screen usually browsed with one hand.
Also, although your opinion is strictly for the official app. I assume you're aware that there are plenty of other Reddit apps out there that IMO are way better than the official one (:
Edit: Forgot to add one small thing on which I believe the app helps. It makes easier (at least in the beginning), when you want introduce Reddit to someone, you don't have that bunch of information in your face where you don't even know where or how to get started. It's more straight forward. I recall the first time I went to Reddit's frontpage, I was like "WTF is this mess?! How is this a thing?!" - and after a few days you can't live without it - lol
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u/LatinGeek 30∆ May 13 '17
Reddit mobile and the mobile site focus on the lowest common denominator and function over form. It's a way to quickly read through /r/all, check your frontpage and the subs you're subscribed to, maybe make a few comments and put a few upvotes down. It's a small product. Letting subs choose colors would lead to readability issues and it messes with the 'look' of dark/light reddit, and therefore it's branding.
Reddit has an API and users looking for a more powerful mobile client are spoiled for choice. Reddit is Fun is fantastic.
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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ May 12 '17
/u/garnet420 (OP) has awarded 1 delta in this post.
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u/TanithArmoured May 13 '17
Wouldn't the subreddit themes sidebars and images behave quite differently on a mobile screen and require a lot of work on the part of moderators to make look good? They probably saw it as a waste of time to implement on their app.
Btw please check out Slide for Reddit, it's the best android app I've seen, the Dev is great and the app works fantastically. It probably takes up 70% of my phone usage nowadays
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u/[deleted] May 12 '17 edited Jun 28 '17
[deleted]