You’re assuming there is some cohesive strategy here. It’s better to look at what often happens in practice at a more practical level.

Some exec will be constantly getting pressure to make his mobile app growth chart keeping going up. So instead of doing customer research finding out what people want, having a product vision, market research, making it so good Redditors tell other Redditors how much better it is, etc they just say why not just force existing web users to use it?

It’s just lazy belligerent tactics so [x] chart goes up. The mobile app team probably has a ton of political pull so they get to stomp on others to get their metrics.

It sounds like you are saying there is no reason other than pressure, presumably from a board. Perhaps the board has a reason.

Probably sopping up more money from all the privacy intrusions possible with an app. Better ad revenue. Probably spent money on the app and need validation of the expense. Board might even have threatened whole team terminations without better app take up.

How many times is improvement UX in desired there?

I think people are usually over-inclined to assume that these companies know what they're doing; that there is, somewhere, some well-thought-out master plan. Often, there isn't.

Even with Twitter, which has just been a cavalcade of obviously nonsense moves for months and months, there are still believers in The Plan. I'm actually a little curious why this is; despite presumably having had interactions with poorly-run companies in the course of their daily lives, some people _really_ seem to struggle with the idea that a company might be poorly-run, and seek any other explanation.

Because a reasonable person will have a plan. Maybe not the best plan, maybe not a master plan, but a plan. To your specific point:

'person knows what they are doing' does not equal have a 'well-thought-out master plan'

Problem in big companies is that its is filled with people that , especially the higher you go, have their own plans and agendas. Sometimes they align with each other and oftentimes some part of company is actively trying to sabotage some other part of company.

Individuals also have their own personal goals such as high bonuses or maybe high IPO, where you will sell out and become rich.

And as CEO you have to not only have a plan, but also set up initiatives for people to follow it, which is often harder than it seems. That is why it sometimes seems a company is sabotaging itself. Sometimes there is something deeper going on but sometimes they are sabotaging themselves.

An apposite war story from Nokia, just about the time the iPhone entered the market: our Lords and Masters had decided that internal competition would be a good thing, so smartphones were divided into business, entertainment, and mass market divisions with each bidding for exclusive access to the components being delivered by the the R&D and productisation teams. So it was that barcode readers ended up with "business" (use case: scan a business card) and auto focus cameras with "entertainment" (use case: selfie). With of course the result that the business phone needed an A4-sized business card held at arm's length. This absurd "strategy", probably sold in by a gaggle of consultants, was first celebrated then subject to extensive soul-searching and some tedious "lessons learned" enquiries that resulted in long PowerPoints filed carefully in NUL, rather than perhaps simply resolving next time to ask some small child working in the front line just what they thought of the Emperor's splendid new attire...

I’m not necessarily pointing a finger at the pressure or motivation to want mobile app growth. Pre-IPO is a stressful time. It’s mostly about how the team goes about attempting to accomplishing those goals and a management/product culture and talent thing that was likely in place well beforehand. Based on the last redesign and https://new.reddit.com there are plenty of signals of doing things for the sake of doing them or for UI trends, not because it makes it fundamentally better.

It’s easy to miss these failures internally and assume the teams/management are functional and effective when your app keeps growing… via Reddit’s content and existing market dominance.

The VC board always has the same reason: revenue, revenue per user and their respective quarter over quarter percentage delta. Number go up = good. Number go up less than last quarter = bad. Number not go up = disaster.

I think your hypothesis is underrated. For sure part of the argument is to get around ad-blockers but people underestimate both the level of dysfunction and just how awful some people in powerful positions are.

This argument is at the intersection of “Wet streets cause rain” and “is pretty likely to be accurate”.

“All these other companies are successful and had experienced large mobile growth along that success. Maybe we can force that same success by boosting our own mobile numbers.”

See also Goodhart’s Law.

There's also a huge disconnect between what power users want and what the ad-viewing cannon fodder will tolerate. Headlines this week say that Netflix cracking down on password sharing has been hugely successful driving new signups.

Sometimes you just have to destroy the site to meet your OKR goals. Who hasn't done it once or twice in their career.

It's 100% about being able to stop adblockers

And access to push notifications

iOS 17 supports pwa notifications, so it's pretty much exclusively ads at this point

iOS 17 isn’t out yet.

"support" means that user needs to explicitly do something (add as an "app") before you can get notifications which is not as easy as in the app

And access to more data for analytics and attributions than is available to a web page.

On mobile?

Apart from a few geeks using firefox on android, mobile browsers generally dont hinder ads

Every single browser except Chrome would be a better way to put it.

You can install an ad filter, set up content filtering, and then use Safari without seeing ads.

AdGuard on iOS blocks ads just fine. I pay $5 a year because then it blocks YouTube ads.

Brave browser.

Samsung Browser and Safari both very much enable ad blocking, and especially Samsung actively notifies users to enable it.

There have been lots of complaints about a well-funded advertising campaign from Hobby Lobby called "He Gets Us". App users are getting DMs from the advertiser and are unable to block the adverts or user. Other advertisers are blockable, which stops those ads.

The decision maker likely wants the app installed because it increases the friction to users to “replace” the app with a competing one. Amazon used to offer $5 credits to install their app years ago, and I initially struggled to understand the reasoning; however these days its so convenient to buy via the amazon app compared to signing up for an account on different websites (i am more likely to use Amazon which is already installed than to go directly to some manufacturer and buy directly)

For Amazon, I prefer the web-app since it's able to open tabs for products I'm comparing. With the app, you're forced into a forward/back/forward navigation pattern that I think is sub-optimal when comparing products.

Is there something I'm missing here? It seems that the app is the less usable experience to me.

Yeah this is a common theme. The web presence often gets more attention ironically, because it is the facade and starting point for the given endeavor. Then comes greed and they try to discourage web usage ... we've all seen it play out over and over.

Push notifications! Super valuable for driving re-engagement.

"Install the app" walls might be super effective at destroying reengagement, though.

I gave in and installed the Reddit app, but it simply doesn't work well enough or transition well enough from a Google search into the app. Would definitely engage a lot more with Reddit if only the app pushing nonsense were gone, and that's as a user who does have the app installed.

When Reddit first tried pushing their mobile app I gave it a try, but it was so horrible I decided to stay on web. But they kept degrading the web experience, so I quit Reddit on mobile until discovering Apollo. At this point I don’t browse on desktop, and with Apollo being shut down, I don’t think I’ll be back.

Same for me but with RIF.

RIF is reddit to me, if they stick to it and block API access I'll log on one last time to delete my account.

websites can do push notifications though now

Not unless you go through a kind of esoteric “install to Home Screen” process, which most users aren’t likely to do.

I asked the marketing team about it when I used to work at a restaurant reservation company 5+ years ago and the numbers were clear, marketing notifications work, way more engagement.

If the user follows a link to an article or video, there's a high chance it'll be the end of their reddit session, due to distraction or back button capture. There's also a high chance the browser will unload the reddit page causing a flash of no content and potentially losing the user's scroll position. After a few rounds of this the user will leave in frustration.

Now they could use the tabs feature, but this is again a lost opportunity to have them browse some comments etc. Plus, if they need to browse for another purpose, you'll just be one or ten of a hundred open tabs instead of one of the couple of recent apps.

>If the user follows a link to an article or video, there's a high chance it'll be the end of their reddit session, due to distraction or back button capture.

Ironically this is made worse by apps teaching users not to multitask. You can't open a tab to read later.

> There's also a high chance the browser will unload the reddit page causing a flash of no content and potentially losing the user's scroll position.

The funny thing about this is that this misbehavior is mostly exclusive to badly written SPAs and other heavily-JS’d sites. Plain old rendered HTML sites like old Reddit don’t flash blank and restore scroll position fine.

Blocking Ad Blockers

The web puts the user in control; apps (on all significant platforms currently existing) put the company in control.

Yes, Google and (especially) Apple may force Reddit to comply with this or that, but Google and (especially) Apple also prevent the user from doing all sorts of things they can do with an open platform like the web.

Users can't block ads in an app. Users can't block telemetry. Users can't prevent tracking, at least without help from the platform vendor. Users can't easily save their favorite content from your app if the company doesn't want them to. Etc.

The web is fundamentally user-centric, and apps are roughly the opposite of that.

There are also legitimate user-benefiting advantages of apps, such as ability to use the accelerometer or other non-web features, but I can't really think of any that convincingly apply to Reddit's app. Maybe somewhat better push notifications, and "sign in with Apple" but... still seems like another own-goal from team Reddit if they are, in fact, doing this.

This, this and exactly this.

Their finance team probably made a projection that if they can get X% of current mobile web users onto the app, they’ll be able to extract Y% more total revenue. They have no idea that they should split users into contributors and lurkers and even if they had, they have absolutely no idea how to model their value, so they don’t, the board sees the numbers and tells them ‘ASAP’ and that’s how you kill social networks, because the financial model is based on false assumptions.

> They have no idea that they should split users into contributors and lurkers […]

They probably did do the maths and conclude that the contributors who'll stick around are driving a significant part of the desired engagement. Dumb memes and culture war potshots and disinformation sure, but engagement.

It’s less about extracting that revenue and more about extracting that sweet IPO capital with a story about being replacement-TikTok.

The IPO capital you can raise is a function of your revenue prospectus.

If you have NNN million users, and you have full location tracking, purchase history, device ID, contacts, search history, list of other apps installed, usage data, Wifi SSIDs, Bluetooth beacons, etc. etc. etc. that's going to look like a huge payday compared to those same users running a mobile adblocker.

And if you're not currently collecting location tracking data, and you've got half a decade of meteoric growth, well, turn it on. Forecast that graph up and to the right, and just flip the switch to the "get money" position.

Due to the winner's curse, you only have to convince a few investors. Even if a significant fraction don't trust your prospectus and imagine that some users might be turned off by a post-IPO monetization scheme, you merely have to convince a small group that your numbers are accurate and you're TikTok 2.0.

The key point in that is that many IPO buyers are willing to believe in imaginary revenue that will never be extracted. Extracting revenue as a goal in and of itself uses a different playbook than IPOing.

Yeah, IPO (or VC) capital at this point is a Pavlov's dog trained to expect riches from every additional bit of private information in the data feed.

> They have no idea that they should split users into contributors and lurkers

Comments like this amaze me. People really think these giant corps are out here not doing things like this.

I think the problem is that people read the analyses that companies share publicly (e.g., in a press release or earnings call), and they assume that that's all they did.

You should assume that any numbers shared publicly are just the tip of a giant-ass iceberg and that there were probably 10x more analyses going on internally that weren't shared.

The thing that ultimately gets shared publicly is whatever avoids using advanced stats or internal jargon; They want a single soundbite, not a scientific paper with a full methods section.

Story time: Worked at a large multinational, and 6-7 years ago they decided they had to ape into the whole “data science” gold rush. They spent millions of dollars on hardware, software, salaries, and consulting.

After a year with not much to show for it, the VP for the silo starts to put out kudos for the team for break-even revenue impact. However, behind the scenes, the insight they were taking credit for was a common sense idea that had already been in the e-commerce team’s backlog.

Nothing surprises me when a company says that they’ve run the numbers.

i think that many business get lured into doing data-science because they think that math/stats powers grant borderline-mystical powers and that they can be used to peer into a data warehouse and create with ideas/business strategies that no mere mortal (i.e., people with domain expertise in business) could have dreamt up.

But... most businesses aren't that complex, and people can usually come up with really good common sense ideas for how to make improvements. Data-science is often most effective when it serves less as a visionary idea-maker and more as translator that helps common-sense ideas become real (optimizing the precise values used, figuring out the best roll-out strategies, building forecasts).

People really think a giant corp acts a monolithic entity with perfect distribution of knowledge and ability and the stupid actions of dumb individuals will always be stamped out rather than amplified.

And yes comments like this amaze me too.

Me too. Reddit almost certainly ran those numbers.

They might have chosen to ignore them. They might have fed biased assumptions into their calculations. Project management might have messed up and deprioritized the features meant to placate that section of the userbase. Institutional churn might have resulted in the corporation forgetting that they ever did run those numbers or why they are now heading down this path.

Having worked at some quite large companies: yes, it happens for real that they do not do stuff like that. It is likely that some team obviously has ran the numbers but that does not mean they made it to the people who made the decision.

Reddit is far from giant in terms of employees or revenue, and you'd be surprised at how many dumb decisions and how much money is wasted by startups that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars. You really shouldn't assume competence in situations like these, especially when Reddit has recently been making a bunch of terrible long term decisions to try and juice their numbers in the short term for IPO

Big (and small) companies routinely make "data-driven decisions" based on obviously-faulty data collection, bad models, or misapplication of statistics. It rarely takes some crack scientific mind to spot it, either. But they want a decision now and doing it right might take a lot longer or cost more, or the correct model might be a lot fuzzier and that makes them uncomfortable, or they've got some notion in their heads already and they'll be damned if mere numbers are going to get in the way of that, so everyone in the room's just supposed to nod along when the blatantly-biased graphs come up on the Power Point suggesting (erroneously) that we do X.

The business world runs at least as much on bullshit as the most cynical among us might think, I'd say. It's not half as clever or competently-run as one might hope, certainly.

It's a cliche that front-line workers have a better understanding of customers and products than the c-suite and that this leads to predictable blunders, because that's often true.

(I'm also not sure I'd call Reddit a "giant corp", but that's beside the point [EDIT] and anyway, to be fair, this particular discussion isn't just concerned with Reddit)

Often the decision is already made. The numbers game is how you sell the decision internally.

My former boss, someone I used to think had a brilliant business mind, at an e-commerce company, forced us to produce a shitty mobile app, and then to pour more resources into it, because of how the average spending of users in-app was higher. I mean, no sh*t, these are people who are such fans of your brand that they want to download a whole dedicated app for shopping at your site. Of course they’re buying more. I have an app for stores I frequent a LOT, but would not see myself installing one for like, stores that I visit maybe once a year. But the causality was in the other direction.

Let's not forget that the in-app browser page can be injected with whatever javascript the owner of the app wants. FB/Instagram use this for tracking. There is a more comprehensive list of what apps do this somewhere; I do not remember where it is. But for FB/Meta, you can find the info here: https://krausefx.com/blog/ios-privacy-instagram-and-facebook...

Worth pointing out that not all in-app browsers are created equal, however. A huge number of apps, probably the majority, on iOS use SFSafariViewController for theirs, which is basically an isolated Safari tab that runs out of process and app developers have no access to. Furthermore, SFSafariViewController instances are unique per-app, each with their own separate set of cookies so apps can’t trick you into visiting a link to gain access to full Safari’s cookies.

IIRC Android has something similar that opens an isolated Chrome tab within apps but I have no idea how common usage of that is in Android apps.

The question is, is there any way for the user to tell the difference just by looking? Or is that something you have to be able to examine the binary to be able to determine?

On Android, when you have the WebView open, go to the app switcher and the title will tell you which app provides the view: the original app, or your browser.

Yes, the one that is “clean” has the open in Safari icon. However, as soon as that becomes common knowledge I’m guessing the malicious apps will be adding that icon

They look significantly different on both platforms, so it's easy to notice if you know how ewch one looks

You are correct; however, in the case of some of the biggest apps (Reddit's official app among them), they use the old WKWebView specifically for the ability to inject code. The more user-centric third-party apps that Twitter/Reddit have targeted lately used SFSafariViewController.

Can't always do that, though. Apple gets especially angy if you're injecting necessary stuff into the page, we found as a general rule they'll fail your app approval for anything like that (unless you're a big boi like FB I guess).

> Users can't block ads in an app. Users can't block telemetry. Users can't prevent tracking, at least without help from the platform vendor.

Adguard does a pretty good job of blocking these things inside of apps.

Adguard costs money and non-tech savy userbase has no idea it even exists, even less how to use it. And that is the userbase they wanna keep, I feel like they are purposely alienating their power-user base.

Awareness is certainly an issue, but I've enabled adguard's DNS on my mobile device and it does indeed block almost all ads and doesn't cost me any money.

Admittedly, I'd prefer not to depend on third party DNS as a solution, but it's trading one entity having access to my requests for another. I used to be able to do this with a simple hosts file/blacklist solution, but I finally succumbed to the various user-hostile policies of "ability to elevate to superuser is OK on a laptop, but not on a phone" and have not enabled su on my current device (needed to manage hosts file).

Adguard blocking inside apps is exclusive to DNS methods, these methods are extremely easy to circumvent by app providers. Reddit (as an example since topic of thread) already gets around these DNS blocking methods because content and ads are served from the same location.

Not only that, they now have a perfect way of tracking the association between multiple accounts, which is very helpful for selling a person's ahem real browsing history.

> apps are roughly the opposite of that

Although I broadly agree with this assessment, I'd just like to add a slight nuance that, at least in my view, it's specifically _app store apps_ that are roughly the opposite. You can still, for example, install random APKs (on Android, I doubt Apple has anything similar) if you're so inclined, so they can be as user-centric as you want. It's just that the major manufacturers optimize for the roughly-anti-user-centric flow.

On Android, you even have f-droid, an entire alternative app store that only accepts open-source, user centric apps!

That depends on the implementation, but its just a fundamental technology difference. On the web, the default way to do things is to use a bunch of HTML elements and whatnot, which are user-agent-introspectable, even if they are modified using a blob of code.

With apps, you kind of by definition only have a blob of code. As an user and with a sufficiently advanced operating system, you can block some outside-world interactions like internet connections, but the app only has to give you a render target whose pixels can be drawn to arbitrarily. Some apps even use integrity verification features from the OS vendor to check if they haven't been tampered with, that is much harder to do on the web.

Which is incidentally why there is so much interest in high performance web programming and being able to draw arbitrary pixels to a render target (hello canvas/webgl/webgpu). Expect content blockers to become way less effective in the coming years (even ignoring the big obvious attacks like Chrome's Manifest v3).

> Expect content blockers to become way less effective in the coming years

That's s very sad and probably very accurate analysis!

Wonder if the arms-race will give rise to other kinds of add blockers that use image recognition to identify ads. But that still requires rendering the ads (even if only in the background), removing much of the benefit of ad-blockers.

I suspect some might be able to rise up by injecting themselves at framework level, since it's very likely that the programs will still keep some sort of in-memory representation. Though I don't think that injecting code into other WebAssembly blobs is possible with the security models we have today.

The surefire way would be an external application that uses OS APIs to fiddle with memory directly (bye bye mobile content blockers).

But whatever form it takes, it would have to be programmed to operate on every framework available, so it's way less universal than writing a CSS selector or URL regex.

I would still say that even FOSS apps off F-Droid are less user-centric than the web. They're more likely to respect the user, for sure, than even most web apps. And a user who is comfortable with code can always fork them and customize them. But the barrier to entry for a custom experience is much higher on an app than it is on the web. Browser extensions are highly accessible to many people and can allow tweaking the experience beyond what the developer natively enabled.

As a simple example: Dark Reader has 5 million installs on Chrome. That's 5 million people who can view a web app in dark mode even if the developers didn't think to provide a native way to do so.

My thoughts exactly. I do lots of "tinkering" with my web experience and have a few open source apps that I build and install, and the barrier of entry on apps is way higher than for websites. Even for an app that is open and friendly, it's still a major undertaking to get a dev env setup and debug/tinker. And once you do, auditing the app to see what it does is further difficult. With the web you don't even need a dev env, and an extension like uMatrix makes it pretty easy to audit the site and see what it's doing/loading.

I'm to the point where I boycott apps. I will only use an app if there's a real benefit to me for doing so, such as podcasts and music and offline functionality or those that use hardware features.

Surely there is a way of checking api calls made by an app and blocking those?

I have never looked into this mind

HTTPS means the network connections between the app and the backend are opaque to third parties including the user.

Certificate pinning means you cannot insert yourself as the backend and/or MITM the requests. The app will only communicate directly with the owner of the private key it was pinned to.

Depending on the app and OS, it may be more or less easy to change the app to remove/crack the pinning. In general, if you are not in full control of the device (root), it's not possible.

for android you pull down the apk using adb, patch maybe 1 byte in it and push it back

very very easy, no root required

I'd love to read a tutorial or watch a video going over the patch process -- can you share any links?

I wouldn't call patching a binary very easy, especially since our point of reference was installing an ad blocker extension in the browser. Also, it takes more than one byte if the binary is obfuscated and full of various ways to check that it hasn't been tampered with.

> I wouldn't call patching a binary very easy

it's even easier than that as all apps (except native ones) will be using the java TrustManager interface

> Also, it takes more than one byte if the binary is obfuscated

but they can't hide the calls into TrustManager

a small utility could automatically take in the APK, patch out the calls and return the fixed APK for you

(would probably work for 99% of apps out of the box)

> it's even easier than that as all apps (except native ones) will be using the java TrustManager interface

Is this required? i.e. do all apps have to use the TrustManager interface to accomplish cert pinning, or is that merely the official way?

> Is this required?

well, Java is Turing complete, so you could completely re-implement TLS yourself instead of using the API that comes with the platform

in practice no-one is going to do that

> HTTPS means the network connections between the app and the backend are opaque to third parties including the user.

It means the payload is. HTTPS alone doesn't have any special considerations for hiding the domain, which I think is visible so the request can be routed correctly. And since a lot of ad-blocking is based on domain, that ought to work.

You're not wrong, but ads are already moving to a different model with either first-party URLs or random ones that are difficult or impossible to enumerate to get around ad blocking. With Apple's new thing that's going to bring the reckoning even sooner (sigh). This technique is much harder and won't last very long I'm afraid.

You can block ads in apps. In android 11, you can have it use OpenDNS's adblocking server.

Not always, though. For instance it won't work on YouTube ads. I'd call it a hack at best.

I'm sure you're already aware of this, but for other HN users on Android, ads on YouTube are blocked when using Firefox Android + uBlock Origin + m.youtube.com -- the experience isn't as nice as the app but still totally worth it IMHO.

Use Youtube ReVanced if you want the full app experience.

I suspect only a small subset of people who generally run an adblocker also block ads on apps as it requires a lot more specialized knowledge.

Settings -> Network & Internet -> Private DNS -> dns.adguard.com

Now you've blocked a large percentage of ads on android.

Shout this from the rooftops.

Phone apps delenda est

Does DNS based blocking work on mobile?

> Users can't block ads in an app.

Yeah, they can. By which I mean, they can do it right away, for the official Reddit app:

– https://revanced.app/patches?pkg=com.reddit.frontpage

– https://revanced.app/download

Or, for even less work, you can just use a pre-patched APK with the ads removed: https://github.com/revanced-apks/build-apps/releases

No need for root access nor flimsy DNS solutions.

any recommended links to learn more about revanced? the best I can find from their website is that they're a continuation of the "vanced" project but it doesn't say what that was and I haven't had luck on google. It's clear that they have something to do with providing patched apps, but is revanced a framework? is it a library? is it a person or group that does the patching?

* * *

"YouTube Vanced" was meant an "Advanced" YouTube client, minus the "Ad"s.

They offered a version of the YouTube client which they patched to remove display ads and video ads, plus add background play, SponsorBlock support, and more.

They became fairly popular before Google shut them down for distributing modified versions of their proprietary code.

ReVanced was one of the teams that popped up in the aftermath, a spiritual successor. They reasoned that they could achieve the same basic functionality legally if they only distributed patches (instructions) rather than a pre-patched binary.

So they wrote an app (ReVanced Manager) that takes a stock copy of the YouTube app, unpacks it, applies patches, then repacks & re-signs it. (They don't have Google's signing keys, so typically users need to install the new version under a new name. Users with root can choose to override the built-in version instead.)

Once ReVanced Manager could do that, they expanded into patching other apps as well.

So ReVanced is a team that maintains:

  * A list of useful patches
  * An engine to apply them
  * A Java CLI frontend to the patcher
  * An Android app frontend to the patcher

(I've skipped over a lot of the history details but this should give the basic idea.)

I work at a company trying to get more people into our app. The logic is completely flawed: "we want more engagement, app users show more engagement than web users, so if we get more users from web into the apps we'll get more engagement". It's obviously completely flawed but the product people and analytics department don't seem to get it.

At least we aren't doing hostile stuff to get people into the apps, yet.

A good compromise is to educate users on how to add a shortcut to their homescreen. I don't think people (including product people) know about this feature, and mobile browsers bury it. The pareto principle applies: 80% of stickiness is that icon, which you can get for 20% of the effort of an app.

It doesn't work for me.

All icons on mobile look the same to me: I mean, Android's Material Design icons really look the same to me and even the icons from iOS never really stick in my head. That "settings" icon for instance with all the gears looks like a movie poster for The Golden Compass and not a settings dialog. The App store and Adobe Acrobat and many applications have meaningless logos based around a generic triangle...

Once something gets a mobile icon I will struggle to find it, but if I want to find something on the web it is a quick search, often autocompleted when I type a few letters, or easy to find in the bookmarks or maybe my history.

On Android the shortcut icon is derived from the favicon, so material design doesn't apply. (There is also a "badge" for the browser app itself).

One way or another there are a bunch of Google-app icons that all look the same to me. Third party apps on iOS or Android generally have nondistinct icons: I have many icons that are basically a letter like "H" with no indication that one of those icons controls my stereo and another one does something else. I use Microsoft' RDP on my iPad all the time and I struggle to find the icon not least because the colors blend into the background but it is just some arrows without stems like the logo of some british railway from the 1970s.

I find myself deleting apps aggressively because the junk apps make it hard to find the few apps I really use, most of all I use the web as much as I can because it is so easy to find anything on the web.

Well it sounds like your problems go far beyond the thing we're talking about. Good luck!

Personally it’s been a long time since I launch anything besides ~4 apps (phone, messages, browser, mail) from the homescreen. There are wayyy too many apps for that (because of BS like reddit is doing) - I always drag down and start typing the app name into search to launch.

I've gone the other way and just don't use very many apps. I'll only use an app instead of the site if I find the app provides actual added value *to me*. And that is not often the case.

And for cases that force you to the app instead of the webpage, I don't use that site on my phone. Which tends to start a cycle where I stop or at least greatly reduce using that that site.

I'm generally not cynical about human motivations, but after seeing many of these things and how thoroughly the "internal propaganda" at tech companies works, I think those are just the reasons they tell themselves. The real reason is the control and the deep analytics that you can get from mobile apps. Plus having an app icon which really does boost engagement, but nowhere enough to justify on its own.

So I actually worked at Reddit a few years ago and our “cohort” got to chat with Steve as a part of onboarding. I was super nervous and I guess I wanted to appear sharper than I actually was, so I asked Steve directly “why do you push users from mobile web to the app? That’s a pretty bad experience.”

Apparently there are metrics showing that mobile app users are “stickier” than web users, meaning they come back to the app more.

That was a long time ago though and my perspective on this probably isn’t relevant anymore.

But third party app users are likely to be even more sticky. Doesn't that mean they should encourage everyone to install third party apps? No, this is just idiocy.

Yes, but the third party apps don't allow Reddit to take in heaps of tracking data or run ads every 3 posts, so for the company's purpose they're useless

You can do push notifications to the app and gamify them opening up and reading again. FB was the masters of doing this.

I have uninstalled several apps that I actually wanted to use due to trying to do this. I feel you probably increase engagement of the users who stay at the cost of scaring away a whole bunch of other users. I have for example uninstalled the FB app and only user their website.

> I have for example uninstalled the FB app and only user their website.

Well, that is why Facebook and others are pushing to "allow alternative app stores" on iphone. Getting past the app-review process means the dark patterns and data mining can get way more noxious, and at that point they just do like reddit and kill the mobile experience. No, no phones allowed on the website, we have a native app for that.

It’s the same reason as the third-party app API changes: prevailing forces within the company want to know that for every X API requests made, Y targeted ads were put in front of eyeballs. Most mobile browsers can block ads at this point. Plus, native apps offer more ways of gathering user data opaquely, which is worth lots of money in the eyes of finance people even if they haven’t started doing it, or if they expect it to be limited in various ways by mobile OSes and/or laws. The profits vs losses just point them this way, at least according to certain financially-minded people. This isn’t really a new phenomenon.

If Reddit execs thought they could take the same approach on desktop (forcing us all into desktop apps with unblockable ads and more system access), they absolutely would. They see that Slack and Discord did accomplish this effectively, and probably want to catch up.

Slack and Discord work fine in desktop browsers and do not regularly hassle users about installing a desktop app. I think Discord users often install the app for actual user-centric features that are not possible to provide from a browser (push-to-talk voice chat while playing games for Discord, as I recall).

I don't think either of those apps are ad-supported, so there are completely different incentives.

They could have changed their API or keys to require an adserve API included and given the app makers time to adapt to the new setup.

Premium users would only see the ads from Reddit, where non-premium would also have seen ads from the app maker.

It would have increased the ads shown to users, added more money into reddit's pocket, and increased the liklihood of users paying cash for the platform while pissing off fewer people.

I too find this baffling. I have developed and maintain two platform native pairs of apps in use in the agriculture level irrigation control sphere. Our reasons for doing so are varied (historical, user experience, performance, desire to minimize cloud dependencies, need to really push Bluetooth and other OS assets (like location, storage, and photos)). But it is a butt ton of annoying work. From Java to Kotlin, Android to Compose, ObjC to Swift, UIKit to SwiftUI. It seems to never end. How I would love to use the a “cross platform silver bullet”, but I spent 20 years using and pitching Smalltalk in that space and am just really distrustful that that problem is truly solvable. But I’m surrounded by what seems 10:1, if not more, of web programming hoards who all use the cloud and web apps as the hammer to every problem they see. Their enthusiasm through the industry is great. I honestly am confused why I see app after app be retooled native in parallel or in replacement to a mobile web app. The variety of contexts is great enough that I’m uncomfortable ascribing it to a machivelean subtext of control. There’s too much inconsistency and incompetence betwixt the various marketing/steering levels of all the participants to see it as some universal evil plot. I feel there has to be something more general going on.

Easier targeting, especially third-party means higher CPM, means more advertising driven revenue. Also, you’re worth more if you can be tracked across different devices (that became more important after the so called cookie-geddon.)

Speaking as someone who worked in publishing, ad tech and built primarily for mobile (PWA or native).

99% sure the reason is push notifications.

Putting on my PM hat, I bet:

- On web, the biggest top of funnel entrypoint for Reddit is Google search

- On mobile, it’s push notifications

The latter is probably the single biggest retention lever Reddit has. The former is an acquisition lever, but probably doesn’t do much for retention.

> So what am I missing?

AdBlock

Couple of reasons: - Push notifications to reengage the user - Collect more data - you can spy way more on a user using the app than on the web - Bypass adblockers

All this makes losing customers who are not willing to make the transition to the app worth it.

Its easier to collect info on users via a mobile app than via a webpage. My guess is that they're simply trying to increase what they know on their users which is the data they can monetize with their ad customers (with some small print to not get them in conflict with data protection laws).

In addition to all of the control issues that other commenters have mentioned like blocking adblock and including tracking, an app also puts the user in the mindset of using your service by default and exclusively. If you view Reddit on the web, you might copy and link and repost it to Twitter. You're less likely to do that in an app. Additionally, it leads people to use Reddit by default, for all purposes. On the web, I might think "Oh, I should search for this on Reddit", but then if Reddit doesn't have the results that I need I'll check another website. Humans are creatures of habit. Once I get used to opening the Reddit app by default, I'll subconsciously invent ways to use the Reddit app for everything, as my one-stop-shop. Which is why I don't use any proprietary apps, ever, if I can do the same thing on the website. And also why I don't use mobile internet very much, to be honest.

Its the ads