The 3rd party Reddit apps made an effort to be more 'native', and actually used native UI elements to make rendering and interactions faster than the web page could.
WAAAAAY too often the 1st party native app is exactly what the other poster said: a browser context with access to some local native API's in order to hoover more data about the user. It is rare that a first-party app actually has some effort put into it to be a quality app. Is in fact so rare, that the sites that actually put in the effort suffer because folks can't believe that a native app for a site could actually be better or worth it.
I think the parent's point was that an app for reddit only makes sense because they deliberately don't add the features you like to the mobile site. There's no reason those features couldn't work perfectly well in a browser, they just choose not to (and to kill off third party apps).
If Figma runs perfectly well in a web browser, Reddit can do the same. It was built for and evolved almost entirely within the browser, like many other Internet forums. Pure data grab.
Figma shows what it is possible to do in a browser, but the cost of doing so is basically prohibitive. The level of persistence and technical nous needed to stand it up are on par with getting a first-person shooter running at an interactive frame rate on a 286 -- they basically reimplemented a browser within the browser.
According to Reddit's "Staff Platform Engineer (Web Platform Team)":
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Old Reddit has the advantage of being pretty much static non-interactive content. No video, tiny thumbnails, and barely any JS or styling. Some people like this and some don't, but the end result is a very lean website that performs well out of the box.
Which is of course a bunch of bullshit when you consider that Reddit's backend returns most data in under 400ms, and it takes Reddit frontend 3+ seconds to render it
Figma is sort of an Apollo Project among webshit, isn't it? IIRC they did rather extreme amount of R&D to make the webapp performant in spite of the web as a platform. Great that they did, and I hope their insights will keep trickling down to everyone else - but I don't think they're currently an example anyone can actually follow.
It’s great, but it’s not Apollo-level anything. Most games are far more interactively and visually complex. Apples to oranges with UX and interaction problems to solve, but certainly not depth and complexity. I’ve certainly experienced bugs in Reddit’s interface before — there seems to be this idea that they have to be so risk averse that they can’t do anything significant— I’ll bet you a pizza that their official app which implements all the features that people really want to use is made with JS/HTML on the back end anyway.
They’re not indifferent to browsers (less data mineable contexts) so much as actively hostile. For the past few years some things I have to add “-reddit” to my Google searches, because they killed i.reddit.com, which was the only useable, fast, non-complete-shit mobile site they have ever built. Their old. subdomain isn’t really readable in a cell phone.
Their new version is incredibly slow, moves me to sub-pages trying to expand comment threads (very disruptive if I saw something in the Google preview snippet and want to control F to it, but whatever comment that was literally isn’t loaded), and sometimes outright fails to load. now I can’t/wont use it.
So screw reddit, it’s a glorified q&a site, with sub forums run by fedora neckbeards, that’s gotten uppity and chosen to be hostile to users. And for some reason Google hasn’t just downranked it to death. The other day there was a thread complaining that their AI responses are reducing websites clicks. I hope that it is very damaging to reddit.
> make rendering and interactions faster than the web page could.
McMaster-Carr begs to differ. Hell even old.reddit is pretty snappy (but deliberately shittily rendered on mobile). Websites can be fast if you don't stuff them with bullshit or degrade then on purpose to drive traffic to the app.
Right -- their website is a great example of a great web app. Their web site is brilliantly organized. But their revenue comes from sales of their products, not harvesting user data, so they have little need to add all the extra jank.
But if they had a native app (do they?) I imagine they would have the wherewithal to build the app natively, with the same stellar navigation of their website, and maybe some native-only features? Imagine if you could use the 3d sensor + camera of an iPhone, and point it at an assembly, and the app would identify the parts it could, and you could order with one click, or integrate with a local ERP or other systems...
Simply because native UI is faster and more functional and better integrated and better thought out than anything webdevs of any company can put together even if they cared to do it well. Sites like Reddit, or platforms like Slack or Discord, are perfect use cases for native clients, because there's a lot of space to make them better and more streamlined than the webapp.
Unfortunately, that only ever happens when some third party gets involved, and rarely survives long - but the experience, however brief, is glorious. See: RIF ("Reddit is Fun") on Android; Ripcord (Slack/Discord client) on Windows.
It’s a website for showing text and pictures. I know I’m being a bit reductive, but there is absolutely no reason why reddits functionality couldn’t be extremely performant in a browser. In fact the Reddit mobile site actually is very snappy, it’s just full of nagware trying to push you on to the app.
They would seamlessly in the background pre-cache all the articles and images coming up in your feed so if you had intermittent connections like on the subway, you could browse nearly[0] unaffected.
[0] Unfortunately, the app I used in the before-time did not implement queuing for submitting comments/posts so that functionality was broken while you were between stations, and videos weren't cached.
And if you ever push a service worker with a bug, then you make the browser permanently unable to display the site unless the user knows how to manually remove the service worker. I've seen it happen on Gmail.
Yes it is a pain in the ass, but just for other people who read this, the bug was in the self-update code for the service worker. If you mess up the cache configuration it can make the service worker never look for an updated version of itself.
It is quite subtle thing in a very small part of the service-worker code but it is not like any random update can brick your app.
There isn't even a need for JavaScript for reddit though it does seem to require it. I posted this without JavaScript enabled so it obviously would be fine for reddit too. Using an app for reddit doesn't make any sense to me at all. Banking apps make sense, they are doing some crazy device finger-printing to avoid id theft. But when the goal is to convey information use html and css. If you are taking payments then yeah maybe some JS. If it is a game, try wasm. Apps are for things that need access to hardware that the browser doesn't allow, which these days is a short list.
Reddit is in full in AI data hoarding mode. Try to load their website with fingerprinting entirely mitigated and you'll be greeted by impossible are you a robot validation
Chromium with autogenerate device resolution and client agent id with only simple JavaScript enabled(no rtc or gdi data) is enough to wall you from Reddit login script unless you're already validated by cookie
The main reason they make sense is that no matter which version of real reddit you use it's got irritating behaviors. But a browser based better reddit wrapper could easily also make sense.
That is in context of Reddit being Reddit. It kept screwing with its mobile site for years (now it's FUBAR btw), so third-party apps were the only sane way to use it on mobile. Even Reddit’s official app used to be a decent third party app - Alien Blue. Then Reddit bought it and made it pathetic. That’s why people used third party reddit apps.
On desktop, the browser’s always been the best way to use Reddit — as long as old.reddit still works. If you are on a non-Safari browser, there's also RES.
Same goes for many other sites. Like HN — it’s fine on mobile browser unless I bump the font size, then it pretty much breaks. But I’m not installing an HN app for something the mobile usage time share is barely 5–10%.
I used vger.app (a frontend for a Reddit alternative) as a PWA for a few weeks. Then when the native Android app released I switched to it and it felt so much better to use. I can't tell you why, it was just more responsive.
Native apps make sense when you need to tap in to platform specific features like the Lidar api and such. They don’t make any sense for most websites.