Reddit

They can serve you ads just fine on mobile web, that’s not it. It’s that the app let’s them track your behavior far better than the web browser.

What the F Reddit, are you trying to speedrun the worst decisions a website can do??

They can get fucked then. I'm tired of this closed internet, walled garden attitude from large social media companies. They've taken the tools that people built to make information free and available, and have locked them down for their own selfish purposes. I will not give them any more of my time.

Why would the owners of a website want to make it harder to browse their website

I honestly hope reddit keeps fucking up like this. It takes a lot of work and a long time to drive millions of casual users away from your site.

Hey Reddit, There's a reason why there were a dozen alternatives to your official Reddit app.

I miss-cropped, OP for context:

Since Reddit removed the option to "stop asking to open in app" in mobile browseds it was clear this would be the next step.

Spoofing user agents go brrrrrr

Seriously, the data mining is going to put so much load on their servers, this is whole thing screams "management considered the technology teams assessment, but decided to go forward with [dumb project codename for fucking the platform over]"

I'm utterly shocked and appalled. /s

This will assist me further in avoiding using Reddit on my phone.

Makes no difference to me.

I stopped using Reddit and I’m glad that I don’t have to worry about this kind of user hostile changes.

They don't know that the primary use case for reddit on mobile is getting good answers from Google.

CEOs will happily restrict your freedoms for just a bit of profit, and destroy any competitors who threaten their monopoly. I don't get how anyone can defend this system in good faith.

Doesn't surprise me a bit, before you know it they'll block the site completely when they detect an adblocker. (I already found an app that refuses to start when you block ads, so the techniques are out there)

And this is where I stop using Reddit altogether. I don't want to use any app, let alone the piss poor official app. I can barely read the site in desktop on my phone. And I only access it from my phone. So there's no reason left to go there. Taking away the compact site was bad enough, taking away the entire mobile site is the last straw...

Even now anytime you access Reddit mobile website and see an NSFW post, it would prompt you to install the app without an option to cancel. Literally the only way to continue without switching to the app was by using old.reddit.com

old.reddit will prolly be next

With how awful the interface is and how it spams me with DOWNLOAD THE APP TO SEE MORE, it kinda already "blocks" it for me. Browsing via Libreddit on mobile is so much better.

Reddit making dumb decisions?! Impossible.

Oh my, that is such a great idea, right on par with everything else they've been doing.

Reddit's fucked

I only use reddit in 2 places. At work, where I am looking for an answer to something, I am not logged in and blocking ads. And the other is at home when I am winding down for the night. I use third party apps because the first party app sucks. I will just stop scrolling at home where I am logged in and they are gathering my data. And I will avoid reddit for answers when I am at work in favor of other forums.

Not surprising, since ad blockers are a thing even on mobile these days.

lmao, they can't be serious

that would be a final nail in their coffin

That app is POISON. On my poor low storage phone it quickly ballooned up to 1.3 gigabytes as it cached things. That itself would have outright driven me away from Reddit.

They have been doing a form of this for a long time. On the mobile browser, I can find individual posts, but if I try to click on the comments or anything, it just redirects me to the appstore to download the official garbage.

If you want your app used so much, just make it snappy damn

I genuinely don't get it. I fully understand pushing users towards the app. But there is going to be a portion of users who will never install your app. So at some point, you are just pissing off those users by making your product worse and worse, and they're never going to install the app anyway. I'd rather the utterly atrocious experience of browsing the laggy desktop site on my phone.

How horrible. I refuse to install apps at all if I can avoid it. I much prefer having a back button, bookmarks, being able to save images, control location access and all that. I already barely use reddit now but this would ensure that I never do.

The official Reddit app doesn't work on older phones, guess I'm out of luck. I can afford a new phone, but I don't feel it's worth it to buy a new phone just for one app.

Too much salespeople see complaints like "your application is bad" and answer with "we're going to force it on you even more then".