It's an app for Reddit. Go figure. I'll be sticking with Sync (Android), which doesn't have this bewildering region restriction, has tons of features and faithfully follows Material.
Countries can lean on Google and Apple and say "Get this app out of my country." We are rolling out one by one so that we can stay on top of the content reports. Reddit has a lot of potentially controversial content and countries have various levels of sensitivity to that. It would be counter productive to go global now, get banned in a bunch of places, and then have to fight protracted battles in a bunch of different places to get back into those stores. See: Secret in Brazil.
This doesn't make any sense. If they would ban the app, wouldn't they also ban the website?
Secret is a different case, the purpose of the app is to anonymous communication, I can see why Brazil has a problem with it (mass protests recently, protestors probably using secret, amongst other things)
Exactly, so far as I know Reddit already responsibly complies with subpoenas. Secret is designed to defeat that process and is completely unlike Reddit.
Let's keep in mind that you also didn't release it in much more open countries than the UK or the US.
If you worry that countries like Germany or Switzerland might censor you out of the market because of reddit controversities you'd probably overestimated reddits emotional potential.
To make this clear: Nobody in Germany requested a takedown of that subreddit. A German agency (BPJM) sent Reddit a letter with a few questions about that subreddit. Reddit then blocked the site for German IPs but it was not requested to do so.
The BPJM does not have authority to block foreign websites. They do maintain a (non-public) list of websites deemed harmful to the youth which e.g Google uses to not show certain sites to German users. They planned to add that subreddit to this list.
That's quite far from censoring but rather Reddit censoring itself.
Not really, because reddit had a choice not to censor itself. The result would have been that /r/watchpeopledie would be not findable in German Google with safe search on, and that it would be blocked in all schools, and if you install a family blocker software at home.
Thanks for the details on why you're doing it slowly. Can you please also explain why you did not do either of the things i mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11447494 Or maybe say whether you even plan to do any of them. It's easy to go "yeah they're just self-focused", but it would be nice to know what the actual process was.
We're now available in the US, Canada, UK, and Australia. Launching apps in other countries requires a little bit more diligence than just making a website available globally.
I'm sorry it's not available in your country -- we're planning on getting it out everywhere.
Your failure here is not that you are not making it available, but that you failed to communicate this limit in ability.
The flow for me was "hey neat", click link to reddit page, "ok, this looks good", click link to google play store, click green Install button, 'none of your devices are compatible', "what in the ever-loving ...?", go to hn comments, "oh goddamn, not again".
That could've been MUCH shorter and MUCH less confusing if the title up here ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11447273 ) said: "Announcing Reddit for iOS and Android in NA/UK/AUS" and at the very least having a text below the appstore/playstore buttons stating this.
Have some empathy please.
Edit: Going "Hello World!" in the "What's New" section also doesn't help matters.
I remember Google doing the same thing when they launched their "Chromebooks are for everyone" ad campaign - you could only purchase one in the UK or the US.
It's like companies are actively trying to annoy the region's they geo-block.
No, it's like what's actually true - that they don't think about those places and therefore do things like write slogans with the mindset that such people don't exist.
Google still loves doing this with Chromebooks. They have human-translated marketing websites for the Pixel in Norway and their buy button is just greyed out.
Additionally, it's highly unlikely that potential users will bother continuously checking to determine if the restriction on their region has yet been lifted - given that they can continue to use the competition. Tomorrow I will have forgotten about this app.
This should have been sorted out before the launch.
They claim they are committed to supporting that free API[1]. And if they kill it, it would also kill all those reddit bots. There would be a massive outrage since many large subreddits rely on them for advanced automated moderation. There's AutoMod which they've integrated, but it's often not enough.
Query. Is the borking of RSS feeds last couple months related? It was done so poorly(still borked despite assurances contrary)? Would be quite a convenient way to herd a bunch of RSS users to sign up PDQ to keep their TIL & ELI5 fetishes uninterupted.
I'm afraid I did the opposite, however. I don't need a new app, and again contrarily, I don't need a new feed reader. My worthless trivia supeepowers are indeed in decline. Meh.
Can you share what is involved with this effort? It would be educational to the HackerNews community that is (understandably) quite angry at this decision. You can turn this into an educational effort on the state of app distribution.
Frankly, I have a hard time believing that your team couldn't have done this due diligence upfront, considering how rare it is that I encounter apps in my daily use that do not work seamlessly. I moved from North America to Europe 1 year ago, so this is something I have a lot of experience with. You could help me and others understand this better.
I'm sorry, but as an occasional iOS developer, and seeing the amount of Portuguese users you guys have on Reddit, I find it hard to take that at face value. Is it the localised blurb you need? Crowdsource it.
It probably has to do with advertising. The purpose of this app is to monetize the mobile users and they can't make money off users in countries where the ads can't be shown (for whatever reason).
Yeah it's weird. They used this word again in the official announcement thread so clearly they've got a position they want their employees (and Alexis) to take, a fantastically vague corporate one at that.