Comment by spauldo

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We’ve forgotten what an “app” was

Better features, less ads, smoother experience and in the case of Apollo—the one I used—it just looked much better.

Caching and loading times mostly.

I'm on old.reddit.com too and I use the mobile app (including the 3rd party ones back when they existed) for one primary reason: Two windows I can quickly switch back and forth on. On my phone I use Reddit to look up things. I can have a Reddit thread on one window and a Google search on the other and go back and forth. In a browser switching tabs back and forth is painful, often reloading pages, losing the spot in the browser, having this url bar and top bar taking up tons of screen space.

I imagine it depends on how you use it. I came to Reddit late and never got into the old interface. I commented a lot on technical subreddits and didn't do much with the doomscrolling ones.

I used Boost. Its ads were not intrusive (and I despise ads) and the UI was written with a small touchscreen in mind. If not for my distaste for phone keyboards, I'd say it was a better experience than the website on a desktop.

Would it be possible for a mobile browser to have a better experience? I don't know. I value my sanity too much to do web development. But Reddit was absolutely determined to make its mobile site unusable and the official Reddit app had a bad reputation (and I wouldn't give those bastards the satisfaction after being nagged so much to install it), so a 3rd party app was the only reasonable solution.

That was part of the 3rd party app purge. Before then, the 3rd party apps could see NSFW content just fine.