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by bambax 2306 days ago
Many websites indeed pester us to download their mobile app but I have yet to find one that forces me to? Do they actually exist?
5 comments

Reddit forces you to download the app now. You can scroll like 2-4 pages worth of content and then it'll pop up asking you to open in app.

On every page you navigate to from within the website you'll first get a pop up asking to choose between browser and reddit app.

I'm using old.reddit.com and wasn't aware they started doing this. Reddit is turning into a dumpster fire, it's bad enough I have to use the old UI so that it doesn't burn a hole in the cpu.
Forget the CPU usage, I only use the old UI because it's better/ I find it more usable.

Or maybe I'm just getting old :D

It's both.

The new UI is terrible and barely useable. But Gen-Z is used to barely useable UX. (looking at you, Snapchat)

I wont disagree there, it's not useable. I wonder what possessed them into believing any of this was a good idea.
The new UI increases the similarity between posts and ads, making you more likely to mistakingly click on an ad.
the new UI is so uncomfortable to use, I don't like how bloated websites are becoming, but usually I can cope with it. Reddit's is just bad. It's buggy, it's inconsistent, and its resource-intensive.
> I'm using old.reddit.com

Heyo that's awesome! I feel ten years younger.

It's worth noting that Reddit has a vibrant community of excellent third party apps, none of which display Reddit ads.
Which means Reddit is almost certainly going to break all of them, eventually.
> On every page you navigate to from within the website you'll first get a pop up asking to choose between browser and reddit app.

There's a user setting for this, somewhere. I found it once. It's default on but once you un-check it you no longer see the app nags. It's great. And terrible they hid it like that.

--edit-- Or there was, damned if I can find it now.

Reddit outside of old.reddit.com is a dumpster fire. I specially dislike those JS loading icons on mobile, it's just so slow...
You can turn off the prompting for the app in the top-right menu. You don't even need to log in for that.
If I’m ever on YouTube or Reddit I always set request desktop site to always in Safari on iOS.
Yelp! Try clicking "read more" on any review in a mobile browser and see what happens.
You can get around that by selecting "View desktop site" on your mobile browser.
So don't use yelp
This would be a more attractive option if it didn't amount to 'cede yet another part of the Internet to Google'.
Reminds me of when Microsoft took over. Many of their competitors destroyed themselves in the 80s and 90s.
In my final year of university during the late 90s, we'd have different companies come in to do presentations on what they do and why we should work for them. Microsoft did a two hour presentation on how great of a place Microsoft is to work at. About a month later Sun came in and did a two hour presentation on how much Microsoft sucks and how stupid you'd have to be to go work there. We learned almost nothing about Sun from their presentation. After that I really started noticing just how much Sun allowed their business decisions to be guided by antagonizing Microsoft rather than providing products and services to their customers. I wasn't surprised at all by their eventual failure.
Instagram. Can't read messages unless you use the app.

Snapchat is of course app only.

That was true for a while but they added this feature some time ago.

https://www.instagram.com/direct/inbox/

I tried to use imgur on mobile to upload a random image today but couldn't[FireFox]

Using FF on my desktop worked fine.

That is the ultimate end of every free image hosting service.
Being able to work on Firefox but not their own app?
I think they're referring to the Imgur mobile website, which no longer allows uploads, requiring you to download the Imgur app.
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