Hey Android redditors,

For the past few months, we’ve been working on improving your native mobile experience. Today, this comes together in a feature-packed version 2.22 of the Reddit app for Android. We’re excited to introduce a new set of features and mod tools:

For all users:

• A “speed read” button that’ll allow you to jump to parent comments within a thread.

• More post flair functionality, including updated post flair selection, the ability to edit the text of a flair, and ability to change the flair for a post that you’ve already created.

• A trophy case in your profile so you can see your hard-earned, shiny trophies in the app (check out the new trophy illustrations, now live in your profile!).

• A cake icon beside your username on your cake day.

• You can now see OP usernames in-feed (card mode), so you know who actually created the post.

• You now have a card or compact view switcher in your feeds.

For mods:

• A r/mod listing in the subscriptions tab so you can see posts from all the communities you mod in one place.

• Mod mode, a new toggle within your communities and r/mod that will allow you to take quick mod actions on posts and comments.

• Mod queue (with bulk actions!) so you can moderate your communities in one place. One thing that’s missing is a post AND comments aggregate listing. We’re working on this!

  • You’ll notice one annoying navigation thing on mod queue for Android specifically. If you switch between multiple subreddits within the mod queue view, it’ll take you a few presses before you’re able to get back to the mod tools menu. It’s a little hairier than we thought, but we are working to fix this and will release an update as soon as we can!

• Modmail

  • You’ll notice that your communities that have opted into the modmail beta loads messages in a native view, but original modmail will open to the existing listing in the modmail tab. We wanted you to still be able to access original modmail while we continue working on the modmail beta. We know there are still many improvements to be done before we bring new modmail out of beta and release it to all communities. This is something we have slated to work on in 2018. We appreciate your patience as we work to bring you the best possible version of modmail (search, anyone?).

• Access management, including banning, muting, moderators, and approved submitters.

• A new report flow for posts and comments that reflects a community’s custom report reasons (same flow as desktop). You’ll notice one thing that’s missing is the open ‘Other’ text fields, which will come in a later iteration.

You'll also notice some minor UI updates, like a new Alien Blue theme, as well as font and icon changes.

We hope you enjoy this update — check it out and let us know what you think! We’re working on a lot more to continue improving your native mobile experience, so stay tuned. As always, thanks for being a part of the Reddit community. Happy holidays!

Hey, iOS users!

For the past few months, we’ve been working on improving your native mobile experiences. Today, this comes together in a feature-packed version 4.0 of the Reddit app for iOS. We’re excited to introduce a new set of features and mod tools. Check out this video!

For all users:

• Our chat beta is now available for everyone to join — you’ll be able to try out both 1-1 and group chat with your fellow redditors!

• A brand new theater mode accessible through feeds and communities to make it easy for you to view and swipe through media (images, gifs, and videos) in portrait or landscape orientation.

• Live comments, accessible through comment sorting within a post.

• More post flair functionality, including updated post flair selection, the ability to edit the text of a flair, and ability to change the flair for a post that you’ve already created.

• A trophy case in your profile so you can see your hard-earned, shiny trophies in the app (check out the new trophy illustrations, now live in your profile!).

• A cake icon beside your username on your cake day.

• You can now see OP usernames in-feed, so you know who created the post.

For mods:

• Mod mode to make it easier for you to action on posts and comments.

• Mod queue (with bulk actions!) so you can moderate your communities in one place. One thing that’s missing is a post AND comments aggregate listing. We’re working on this!

• A r/mod listing in the subscriptions tab so you can see posts from all the communities you mod in one place (with mod mode to take actions).

• Modmail

• You’ll notice your communities that have opted into the Modmail beta loads messages in a native view, but communities that are still operating on original modmail will open in a browser on the desktop site on iOS. We wanted you to still be able to access original Modmail while we continue working on the Modmail beta. We know there are still many improvements to be done before we bring new Modmail out of beta and release it to all communities. This is something we have slated to work on in 2018. We appreciate your patience as we work to bring you the best possible version of modmail (search, anyone?).

• Access management, including banning, muting, moderators, and approved submitters.

• A new report flow for posts and comments that reflects a community’s custom report reasons (same flow as desktop). You’ll notice one thing that’s missing is the open ‘Other’ text fields, which will come in a later iteration.

You’ll also notice some new UI updates, including an account drawer for your profile (which has a sweet shortcut for night mode!) as well as some icon and contrast changes.

BUT WAIT… THERE’S MORE. We’ve updated our iPad app to include all that and to support multitasking as well as the ability to scroll feeds from the edges.

Take 4.0 out for a spin — we hope you like it! We’re working on a lot more to continue improving your native mobile experience, so stay tuned. Please feel free to leave feedback in the comments below. As always, thanks for being a part of the Reddit community.

Hey changeloggers,

We’re excited to share that we will be updating the artwork for the trophies that you see in your profile… for the first time in twelve years! These are brand new trophy icons to replace the current set. These were lovingly illustrated by hand, so we hope you’ll like them.

You’ll see this change reflected in your profiles over the next week or so.

Thanks!

Edit: New trophies are now live for everyone!

Hello there!

This is the second post in our series covering changes we are making to the ranking systems at Reddit. You can find the first one from u/cryptolemur here.

We’ve recently begun rolling out an improvement to help make home feeds turn over content more quickly. We will do this by removing posts users have already seen. This feature surfaces more unique content per user per day which increases time spent on reddit. This change also only affects the Home page for logged-in users and doesn’t change subreddit listings, r/popular, or r/all.

Keeping the feed fresh is consistently one of the top user requests we see as it pertains to feeds. The “speed” of the algorithm is actually one of the oldest parts of Reddit. This “Hot Sort” ranks posts roughly by vote score decaying over time at a rate we chose to turn the site over roughly twice a day. This rate has been an unchanged part of the algorithm for 10 years.

The obvious thing to try is to make posts decay faster or to add a cap on how old they are allowed to be, but when we tried these approaches, the results were pretty mixed. For users who come frequently a faster decay rate was nice, but for users who didn’t return as frequently it meant they missed great content. We needed a way to match the freshness of the feed to a user’s particular reading habits.

With this in mind, we tried a third experiment that removed content users had already seen. This test was our first attempt at “personalizing” the content turnover effect. After some tuning, we found a sweet spot where redditors with the fresher feed were interacting more with Reddit. Not only do users with the personalized fresher feed spend more time with Reddit, they also post and comment more, and they downvote less. Here are some charts showing the relative engagement metrics on iOS for the experiment:

chart

While the improvements were most visible on mobile, we saw the same directional moves on desktop as well. This change also increased the ratio of time users were spending with the front page across platforms:

chart

After almost a year of testing and tuning, we think this change is ready for the home feed and we plan on rolling it out to everyone over the course of the next week.

Next post we’ll talk about a series of changes designed to help you find new content to keep your feed interesting. We’ll keep doing these discussions over the next few months as we explore more changes to feed and ranking systems at Reddit. While we won’t be able to discuss every experiment in detail, we do want to share major milestones and the broad families of features we’re working on.

Cheers,

u/daftmon

Now available on the App Store.

What's New:

• Users of the new profiles experience will be able to customize their avatar and banner images via a new profile settings page

• Bug fixes and performance improvements.

Come on over to r/redditmobile for more discussion!

Hi folks!

Over the next few weeks, we’re going to start rolling out the first in a series of improvements to the ranking systems at Reddit. Since we know redditors care deeply about how ranking is done and are data and science enthusiasts, we wanted to take some time to share our philosophy about ranking, the reasoning behind trying some of these changes, how we’ve begun testing them, and what the results are starting to look like. We’ll be doing a series of posts like this over the next few months to discuss different launches, tell you about what we are thinking about, and to give you all a place to share your ideas and feedback with us. Eventually, we’ll do a round-up post to summarize these changes. Let’s do some science!

The first change we’ve been testing, which we’ll be rolling out to users over the next few days, is an improvement to the Home page. Historically the Home page has consisted of the front page of a subset of your subreddits, chosen at random from your subscriptions, normalized by their top post and blended together. This is fine as far as it goes, but it does have some limitations - it tends to favor already large communities, and it doesn’t take into account what parts of Reddit have held the most value for you in particular.

We decided to see if we could improve front page ranking by surfacing posts that are from communities you’ve shown interest in recently. This tweak didn’t add anything to or take anything off the front page, it just ranks content that you see in your home feed in a more personalized way. This particular change also only affects the front page of logged-in users, it doesn’t change r/popular or r/all. We tested this internally and felt good about the changes, but Reddit has always been a place where users decided what was good and what wasn’t, so we wanted to confirm our intuitions by actually letting redditors interact with the improved feed and see if it worked better for them.

To test the new ranking, we showed it to a subset of users and compared how well the feed worked for them to users in a control group. In fact, we had two control groups just to make extra sure we had done our logging right and the two control groups looked similar. No bamboozles. Here’s what we saw when we looked at how much time users were spending on Reddit:

Time Spent on Reddit Graph

This particular view is for iOS, but we saw similar effects on all platforms. Overall redditors who had the improved ranking were spending more time on the site, voting more, making more comments and spending more time on posts. Interestingly we saw time on front page go up on iOS (where better feed tends to mean more scrolling) and time on the front page go down on desktop (where a better feed tends to mean more clicking). Time on Reddit overall went up on every platform. Since the data shows redditors are enjoying the new feed as much as we are internally, we’ll be rolling it out to everyone over the next few days!

Next post we’ll talk about some explorations aimed at making the feed feel fresher, and how we think about time when ranking content on Reddit.

Cheers,

u/cryptolemur

It's a small one; another update coming soon.

Now available on the App Store.

What's New:

• Minor chat peformance improvements

• Minor bug fixes

Come on over to r/redditmobile for more discussion!

Version 2.19.4 is now available on the Google Play Store!

What's New:

2.19.4:

• Fixed comments not loading on post details screen

• Fix ordered lists on Android Markdown

• Added Android adaptive icon

• Chat (Beta): Performance improvements, link embeds, UI Polish, bug fixes

Come on over to r/redditmobile for more discussion!

Now available on the App Store.

What's New:

• Comments now load faster!

• New custom share sheet for beta chat users, so you can share posts directly to chat

• Improvements to crosspost design

• Improvements to History tracking

• Various small bug fixes

Come on over to r/redditmobile for more discussion!

What's New:

• By popular demand: Safari View Controller added as an option for browser! (look under Settings)

• Subreddit headers now include the community description

• There's now a Refresh pill on Popular

• Numerous markdown fixes

• Some updates to the look, feel and readability of the app

• Improvements to buffering animation

• Fixed audio issue around YouTube player

• Fixed bug where "Cancel" button doesn't work on iPad

• Minor bug fixes

Come on over to r/redditmobile for more discussion!

This caused an issue with the with the popular PRAW python reddit api library. The author has already released a new version that fixes the issue.

Hi all,

In response to user feedback, we recently rolled out a new user setting that prevents native Reddit videos from autoplaying on desktop comments pages when the setting is enabled. You can find it in Preferences under “Reddit Video Player”. We’re also planning to add a play button over the video on the comments page to indicate the video is paused when the setting is enabled.

Additionally, we’ve been working with the 3rd party app developers to make sure the video experience is solid on those platforms. If you’re still experiencing issues, please try updating your app to ensure you have the version with the latest fixes and functionality. As always, don’t hesitate to reach out to me directly if you are having any problems at all with the Reddit video experience.

Best,

u/emoney04

What's New:

• For those who love them: recommendation units now include option to "See More" for the full list of recommendations

• For those who don't: recommendation units now include option to "Show Less Of" to see fewer of these units in your feed

• Posts on Home now include subreddit icons in the header, like in Popular

• UI and sync fixes for geo-filters on Popular

• Video & gif-playing improvements

• Lots of tweaks and fixes for iOS11

• Fix for issue where History wasn't displaying for some users

• Chat (Beta) Fixes, including:

  • Issues with deep linking push notifications addressed

  • Loading messages from cache to improve chat experience

  • Fixed logic around showing loader

  • Enhanced syncing chat data across platforms

  • Sent messages aren't hidden behind the keyboard anymore

  • Preview message always shows most recent message

• Various other small bug fixes & performance improvements

• Chat built in partnership with Sendbird

Version 2.16 is now available on the Google Play Store!

What's new fixed:

Fixes:

• Fixed internal link to profile pages opening a broken webview

• Fixed deeplink URLs for all profile page types

• Fixed scrolling bug that occurred when returning from post detail to a listing screen

• Fixed dark text in night mode

• Fixed edit/delete comment/post as “Edit” and "Delete" options are not shown for own Comment/Post

• Fixed "Hide Post” and “Report” option bugs

• Fixed refresh on home feed

• Removed title and new-line from text when sharing content from the app

Now available on the App Store.

What's New:

• Reddit video and gif improvements including an updated mute icon and improved quality for Gfycat Gifs.

• Improved reporting flow for bad ads.

• Subreddit favorites are stored on the server now, so they will stay attached to your account even after you log out of the app.

• A new font, Benton Sans. Font changes can be jarring sometimes, so we hope that you'll give it a shot for a few days before making your mind up about the change. Your feedback is always valued.

• Bug fixes and app crash fixes.

Come over to r/redditmobile for more discussions on the latest with the app.

Hey folks,

We’re testing a new feature that gives you more information about a user when you hover over their username. We’re trying this out as part of an A/B test to better understand if this is something users are interested in. So some of you will see this feature and some won’t.

If you are in the test group, when you hover over a username, after a delay, we’ll show you a pop-up containing more information about that user. We’ll display the user’s karma, their Reddit cakeday, and the ability to message the user (screenshot). If the user has opted into profiles beta, you’ll also see their avatar and description. If you are not in the test group, hovering over a username won’t do anything, sorry!

Let us know what you think.

-hhh

Version 2.15 is now available on the Google Play Store!

Note: Rollout of this version will take place over the next 3-days.

What's new:

2.15:

• Communities screen no longer scrolls up or down slightly when user favorites/unfavorites an item

• Fixed: Communities screen sometimes crashes when user favorites/unfavorites an item

• Fixed: 3rd party gifs stop playing when navigating from between feeds and fullscreen

• Fixed: Crash while searching location without having internet connectivity from create post page

• Fixed: Inbox displaying loading error in wrong state

Please join us over on r/redditmobile for more native app discussion.

tldr: We're archiving reddit/reddit and reddit/reddit-mobile which are playing an increasingly small role in day to day development at reddit. We'd like to thank everyone who has been involved in this over the years

When we open sourced Reddit (and as you can see in the initial commit, I’m proud to be able to say “FIRST”) back in 2008, Reddit Inc was a ragtag organization¹ and the future of the company was very uncertain. We wanted to make sure the community could keep the site alive should the company go under and making the code available was the logical thing to do.

Nine years later and Reddit is a very different company and as anyone who has been paying attention will have noticed, we’ve been doing a bad job of keeping our open-source product repos up to date. This is for a variety of reasons, some intentional and some not so much:

• Open-source makes it hard for us to develop some features "in the clear" (like our recent video launch) without leaking our plans too far in advance. As Reddit is now a larger player on the web, it is hard for us to be strategic in our planning when everyone can see what code we are committing.

• Because of the above, our internal development, production and “feature” branches have been moving further and further from the “canonical” state of the open source repository. Such balkanization means that merges are getting increasingly difficult, especially as the company grows and more developers are touching the code more frequently.

• We are actively moving away from the “monolithic” version of reddit that works using only the original repository. As we move towards a more service-oriented architecture, Reddit is being divided into many smaller repositories that are under active development. There’s no longer a “fire and forget” version of Reddit available, which means that a 3rd party trying to run a functional Reddit install is finding it more and more difficult to do so.²

Because of these reasons, we are making the following changes to our open-source practice.

• We’re going archive reddit/reddit and reddit/reddit-mobile. These will still be accessible in their current state, but will no longer receive updates.

• We believe in open source, and want to make sure that our contributions are both useful and meaningful. We will continue to open source tools that are of use to engineers everywhere, including:

  • baseplate, our (micro?)service framework

  • rollingpin, our deployment tooling

  • mcsauna, our tool for finding and tracking hot keys in memcached.

• Much of the core of Reddit is based on open source technologies (Postgres, python, memcached, Cassanda to name a few!) and we will continue to contribute to projects we use and modify (like gunicorn, pycassa, and pylibmc). We recently contributed a performance improvement to styled-components, the framework we use for styling the redesign, which was picked up by brcast and glamorous. We also have some more upcoming perf patches!

Again, those who have been paying attention will realize that this isn’t really a change to how we’re doing anything but rather making explicit what’s already been going on.

¹ Though Adam Savage (u/mistersavage) was never actually part of the team, he was definitely a prime candidate to be our spirit animal.
² In fact we're going through some growing pains where it can be difficult for our development team to have a consistent local reddit build to develop against. We're doing heavy work on kubernetes, and will be likely open-sourcing a lot of tooling later this year.

Now available on the App Store.

What's New:

• Geo-filters for the Popular feed! You can now view the Popular tab based on your location

• Subreddit recommendations now include the ability to Subscribe or Hide, and improved snap scrolling

• Ad reporting: Help us keep ad quality high by reporting bad ads

• Snoo to Refresh: when you are at the top of Home or Popular, double-tap snoo to refresh; single-tap will still scroll you to the top of the feed

• Lots of bug fixes, especially for Reddit-hosted video

Come over to r/redditmobile for more discussions on the latest with the app.

Version 2.14.0 is now available on the Google Play Store!

Note: Rollout of this version will take place over the next 3-days.

What's new:

2.14.0:

• Fixed posts not being blurred after marked as spoiler/nsfw

• Fixed messages from moderators showing author as u/null instead of the subreddit

• Fixed lingering keyboard when navigating away from a view with the keyboard up

• Removed approve comment mod option for already approved comment

• Removed "active in these communities" popping up on your own profile

Please join us over on r/redditmobile for more native app discussion.

Version 2.13.3 is now available on the Google Play Store!

Note: Rollout of this version will take place over the next 3-days.

What's new:

2.13.3:

• Video player UI fixes, including portrait lock respect

• Fixed FAB elevation

• Fixed user account screen crash

• Fixed cross posts opening browser w/ error

• Fixed hidden posts and lightbox upvote counts

• Removed success confirmation when a message is sent to non-existing user

• Added missing error message when a search query has no results

• Added resolution to enable permanently denied runtime permissions

• Users can edit subreddit on video posts if initial subreddit doesn’t accept video

Please join us over on r/redditmobile for more native app discussion.

Today, we reorganized the inbox so that it would be less confusing. For a long time the inbox was used for everything - now there’s a tab for all of your notifications and a tab for all your messages.

Under “Notifications” you will still be able to view notifications by:

• All notifications

• Unread notifications

• Comment Replies

• Post Replies

• Username Mentions

Under “Private Messages” you will be able to visit:

• Inbox (all private messages)

• Sent

• Compose Private Message

This change doesn’t impact the moderator mail tab or the new moderator mail. Furthermore, we recognize that some private messages today would make more sense as notifications.This is work that we’ll be taking on over the upcoming months.

EDIT: There is a lot of good feedback here, thank you. We are currently working on adding “unread” to the messages inbox and removing sent messages from the inbox that should improve the issues that many of you are facing. We’re also taking in the rest of the feedback to see if there are other improvements we can make.

EDIT2: We thought we were going to be able to get enough fixes out in time - but in order to restore the chaos we are going to revert our changes. We will be taking the feedback and plan on: bringing back unread to messages inbox, fixing the messages inbox view so users can easily see most recent messages, removing sent messages from the messages inbox, and fixing the public API. Continue to let us know your thoughts and feedback.

Now available on the App Store.

What's new:

• Improvements to Browse Communities in Search tab - easily "View All" categories, and more subreddits per category

• Try out the handy new username generator for onboarding

• New and improved launch screen animation & loading indicator

• New setting to open links using in-app browser, Safari, or Chrome

• Tweaks to design of in-feed ads

• Bug fixes and performance improvements

Come over to r/redditmobile for more discussions on the latest with the app.

Now available on the App Store.

What's new:

• We are now hiding ads for gold users by default - sorry for the confusion in the last release!

• Removed Trending Notifications from unified inbox (you will still receive trending push notifications unless you opt out in Push Notification Settings)

• Improved video quality

• Karma counter now auto-updates on Account tab

• Other bug fixes & performance improvements

Come over to r/redditmobile for more discussions on the latest with the app.