70% come from the official Reddit iOS app? How much are from visiting Reddit directly and any other Reddit official apps? I'd expect a tech community to use the official apps less than the norm.
Official app on iOS used to be a third party app called Alien Blue. Reddit basically purchased it, re-branded it as official, and viola. On iOS it had tons of usage prior to that. Incidentally after the rebranding is when I stopped using it and moved to Apollo.
IIRC the official app is from them buying AlienBlue, which used to be the best one on iOS. These days it's Apollo.
Apollo recently moved some push notification features behind a subscription to cover ongoing costs, separate from their "Pro" one time in-app purchase, so I think Reddit is at least taking a cut from API usage by other clients.
On Google Play I see 100M+ downloads of the official Reddit app. 5M+ downloads of Reddit is Fun, 1M+ each for Boost, Bacon, Sync, and Relay. Many more in the 100K+ range. Thats maybe 10% at most.
I wonder how many power users, heavy users, or content generating users use unofficial apps. The passive lurkers are great for ad revenue, but the people who comment make the site worth browsing.
The “official app” on iOS is AlienBlue which Reddit bought. So to start with, Reddit relied on the work of a 3rd party developer to make it for them. They’ve since made it bloated and slow and full of ads.
Whatever right? Pretty typical for an official app. But it’s slower and less efficient than all of the 3rd party apps now as they’ve continued to improve.
But to me the problem is not only all of that, but they’re publicly ridiculing other apps (especially Apollo) for their “inefficient” use of the API when they’re all better than the official app.
It’s all just insulting and tone-deaf and speaks to the narrative that they no longer care about a community and see users as $$$.
Here it's true if you talk about official app, which you seem to be doing, but there's a couple of other options - apps made by community, which can be way better than official anything. I guess that Reddit doesn't want to fall behind and that's it.
On android, it doesn't open official or unofficial reddit app for me. Anecdotes not data, but still. It launched the ios app større page for me too, ironically
Presumably there are more popular unofficial reddit apps out there when you start counting Android.
reply