I really hate that about Reddit. I liked browsing discussions on my phone occasionally but the web page kept nagging me into using the app instead. So finally I installed it. But now when googling for information and finding Reddit boards about my topic of interest clicking on „use app“ does not open Reddit app but instead directs me to the stupid App store. Useless! But maybe it’s Apple‘s fault here?
Nope. Deep linking to apps is a solved area. Reddit completely drops the ball on this, and has for years. Their engineering is a complete shambles. The only reason they survive is their market share, not for any reason of 'good experience'
I'm almost tempted to apply for a job at Reddit to see why their engineering is such omnishambles. It's impressive in a way. The only good thing I have to say about it is that they're committed to keeping old.reddit.com alive indefinitely.
Reddit is by far and away the most mismanaged site with hundreds of millions of users. I wonder what the internal politics are like. The leaks have consistently been pretty bad.
I wonder about Reddit's redesign. Was it a case of malice - we want to force everyone to download our native apps so we can track the users better, so we made our website as unpleasant to use as humanly possible - or incompetence - we over-hired and had too many frontend engineers and UX people with nothing better to do?
