There's something that I don't get about forcing mobile browser users into mobile apps - how does it make sense for the company? They're forcing themselves into a walled garden, where the gardener takes a hefty "app store tax" on your revenues and has countless levers to force you to style the app how it suits their interests, not yours. For some apps, this might still be the best way to gain traction. But if have already attracted users who are obviously happy with the web experience, why on earth not keep them there? I would be expecting developers, if anything, to be nudging people in the other direction. But that's not what's happening, not just with reddit, so what am I missing here?
I get that there are some marketing benefits from having your logo on of the user's home screens (likely not the main one), and that very few users even know you can do the same thing with websites, and that in the early days there was a big feature gap between native and mobile apps. But for apps like Reddit, it seems to me like you should be able to achieve everything you could want with modern web standards, and users who use their browser a lot will probably see your logo on the "New Tabs" page anyway. So what am I missing?
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.
> 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?
The documentation[2] is very sparse right now.
[0] https://github.com/revanced/revanced-patches