There's no "better experience" in an app, unless it relies on native features like low-level high performance graphics, accelerometer/sensors, and other physical phone attributes not yet exposed to browsers.

Specific native features that you're missing are platform controls, better UI performance, and support for APIs like notifications.

A comments section on a news site doesn't need high performance UI controls or native notifications.

The fact that Apollo exists and is popular (though, I personally don't think its controls are native enough) means that this isn't really true.

And Sync and AlienBlue if they're still around. It blows my mind that one dev is able to push out such a high quality product where the official app feels amateurish by comparison. It really highlights the difference between development that serves Reddit vs development that serves the user.

Yup, Reddit Sync is great, Relay for Reddit also! The official app is such a disappointment in comparison.

I found Apollo last year and was so impressed that it inspired me to finally get into iOS development.

Until then, not being much of a phone user at all, I'd been convinced that mobile experiences were always worse than desktop ones.

Also, out of the reach of adblockers or tracking blockers.

Sure, but on mobile people don't run ad blockers very often and if they do it's system wide like AdGuard.

It's a lot easier to run browser based ad blockers now than it used to be. Mobile Safari now allows them and installing an adblock extension in Firefox for Android is as easy as on desktop.