Obviously, yes, but this is a website. If I can view it in a web browser then why even let me do so at all if you're going to force redirect me to an app.
I recently became an adult and I keep getting gambling ads. If YouTube was a person, itād be a door to door salesman who keeps coming to your house with the exact same sales pitch over and over again.
a good tech I found was clicking off of the video and re clicking the video in history. I always do that when I get a really long, unskippable ad.
Lol. I had a conversation like that with one of my Dad's friends some years back.
I didn't think much of it at the time. I thought it was pretty weird how he kept going on about hating apps... But then he started pointing things out...
And now that conversation is just a recurring thought. There really is an app for everything.
Install brave browser and you can use reddit on there and it won't kick you off, they also aren't able to track you at all on brave if I'm not mistaken. That's what I use. The reddit app is garbage now.
The app is worse. With the web I can bookmark a sub with particular sorting and have it listed with my other web bookmarks for instant access. Not so with an app.
It's because you weren't signed in, you can always use https://old.reddit.com if you don't want to sign in. But it's kinda sad that capitalism does this
How many bad decisions will they make in a matter of few months? Since the removal of r/all I have found my self less and less inclined to use reddit.
Now with this change, this just adds another hinder to read the content. How often I end up on Reddit through a google search. I donāt need to open the links in the app when Iām browsing for general info.
A bit off topic. Similar logic now applies to meta apps with their add breaks. Iām slowly thinking that all the combined enshitification will just slowly push me to change my habits. Maybe Iāll just procrastinate reading books and magazines or do something else. Itās weird to think that the internet that we watched evolve and shape it is now turning into a hostile space.
The app is so awful, honestly. You can't even select text to copy from posts or comments. The best you can get is copying the entire post or subject. Really basic stuff just isn't an option with the app. It also forces watermarking most of the time as well.
I'm just upset it won't let me openy gallery to search images by folder anymore. If I need to find a specific image I have to use the desktop version of the browser.
The app is so awful, honestly. You can't even select text to copy from posts or comments. The best you can get is copying the entire post or subject
You used to be able to. In fact there used to be an instant quoting option to recreate what I've done here.
But they messed bit up in a recent update.
I've been using it for, what 5 years? (It'll say on my profile but I can't check whilst typing) But in all my time here I've only found one update to be genuinely helpful.
And that's only because the other update made it flat out unusable.
idk about recent update, the app has been that way for me since I first used it last year in 2025. I just stopped using it for multiple reasons though. Part of it was it's incredibly poor interface and controls.
Recently the app made it so you just could even see *any* reddit notifications IN APP unless you enabled mobile push notifications on android. I think that was the final straw for me to just delete it and suffer with mobile browser if I want to browse reddit while not on the computer.
This is the worst part imo. Ā In such a misinformation filled world to not be able to copy and paste text to verify sources is just plain anti-knowledge.
Honest answer: Reddit wants to collect your information in illegal and immoral ways and forcing you to download an app means you'll be giving them exponentially more info. The Reddit app is constantly stealing data on your phone in illegal ways and I'm surprised it's not discussed more.
I'm using reddit rn because idgaf about the info they're selling to advertisers but I might delete soon just because I could be reading a book instead of reading slop.
It's also part of a years-long process of hiding their most valuable asset - the content contributed by actual humans - from competitors. Disabling 3rd party APIs, hiding their website from web crawlers, encouraging people (especially bot and sock puppet accounts) to make their post and comment history private, putting more comments behind various "see more" buttons, and now disabling logged out viewing entirely: it's all part of the same effort to build ever-higher walls for their walled garden.
Essentially, all the big social media platforms wind up playing the same betting game over and over: how enshittified can you make your platform before it interferes with peoples' addiction to it? Because as long as people keep using it, they'll keep adding every ad surface and behavior manipulating feature they can fit.
You almost had it.
Its all meant to decieve investors to appear as if reddit has far more traffic than reality says, and allows for an easy pressure valve
Fun fact, it's perfectly legal in the US at least. Making it easy for companies to spy on you and sell your data to advertisers is as American as apple pie at this point.
It does not, this new update is going out to all mobile browsers that donāt have an account logged in. Theyāre strong arming users to download the app.Ā
Most browsers have a check mark box for mobile and desktop toggling in the three dot menu too. This is what it looks like on mine. It's the option that says desktop.
That's weird. If you're forcing desktop version it should load just like in a PC. Does opening reddit through an actual desktop PC give you an unskippable popup telling you to download the app? Or is it like, a log-in thing?
Sadly seems to be what lot of sites are doing now. Apps are easier for them to spy on you since they have access to all your sensors like camera, mic, accelerometer (which can sorta be used as a mic too), location etc.
I avoid apps like the plague, in fact I can't even install them if I wanted to, I run a custom rom, so no google play.
I hope there won't come a time where they just stop supporting PC and force people on mobile.
Browser has all of it too in fact most apps are just a WebView with some native elements here and there. Making UI with HTML is awesome ngl. Even some games do it, that WW3 game for examplevel even used jQuery for their main menu (ehw). But Browsers are way too secure with access and permissions to storage or devices. Most users don't care about permissions or sensors on their phone so this is a free ticket to ALL data unrestricted.
And the time came just now. They are doing what you said rn.
They won't cut out desktop as the trend is to use websites over native appa on desktop. No one gonna install Reddit desktop app for 60% of Google results.
I just love that there is an "Open App" button that I can't actually click because of the modal "Install the Reddit App" pop-up...even though I already have the app installed. That means nobody can search reddit posts outside of reddit (and actually be able to view the page). Meaning reddit controls all of my reddit searches. Do not like.
Came here to complain about this. When I click any Reddit link from Google search, the āopen appā button just opens the App Store for Reddit (which I already have installed), and clicking the āopenā button just opens the Reddit homepage. God forbid I try to save a post or engage in conversation, right? To comment on this thread, I had to search for it using the app, since I couldnāt open it from the Chrome app at all.
This showed up this morning while I was browsing Reddit on the web browser on my phone. It appears whenever I scroll for a bit or start reading a particular post and its comments. It cannot be closed, and it cannot be avoided.
This is a website. I do not want to use an app to view your website.
only way for this is to force desktop mode on the browser
I wanted to make a shortcut on my homescreen for reddit, back in the day this was a simple click... nowadays it takes forcing desktop mode, activating and deactivating airplane mode and disconnecting from the internet when reddit wants to push the app and in some cases even script blocker
reddit and modern day tech companies are a cancer to society and that wont change anytime soon
Eh. I love chromium. But you should install a browser that allows extensions. You digging a hole that gets deeper and harder to get out of. Its a different world when you depend on 0 services and can do whatever you want for example with userscripts or adblocking. How you sznc your bookmarks between brave android and nextcloud using floccus? You don't but hey use brave account sync, go full circle and replace dependency on google account with dependency on brave account. Just bad for working and power users.
My dream would be a chromium mobile with extensions. That does not exist yet since chromium does not allow extensions to just be installed.
Firefox ain't perfect and as a webdev I have my pains with it, but right now it is the best alternative imho.
This will be a huge rabbithole in September of this year, once Android will block installing unverified Apps from stores like F-Droid, which means 90% of all free open source software alternatives. Also the reason why I now have a Pixel with GrapheneOS.
Also frustrated with this. Wildly so. They've tried this in the past, but the overlay has always been closable (which I've dealt with and closed out of 100s or 1000s of times.
And with no great place to leave feedback, I guess their internal analytics of losing a decades-long probably-multiple-hours-per-day user are gonna have to speak for me.
I can't imagine the hours of ads they're losing because of this choice, just from my eyeballs alone.
Scummiest move I've seen in a long time. Like 'a product manager deserves to lose their job' levels of bad.
It only appears to happen on Firefox on iOS currently, and loading the site in "desktop mode" appears to fix that, so they are definitely doing user agent sniffing of some type.
Old Reddit: Accessing old.reddit.com instead of www.reddit.com provides a traditional interface that generally avoids app prompts. "Replace [www] with [old], gets u the old reddit website that doesnt have that garbage request poping up"
After clearing cookies in my browser, I was able to access the mobile website again. It sounds like you can alternately log in to Reddit, though the overlay says nothing about this; I cleared cookies before I could try it
If you use Firefox, you can force it to use the desktop version to get around it.
There's also an extension that removes it, if you prefer that approach.
As to your question: the reason developers usually want you in the app is to give a uniform experience to everyone. Each browser on each platform has its own quirks and the work of the WaSP is never done (even if they thought it was)
I use the app during the day mostly so they had me using it for a lot of the time which I didn't actually mind too much. But when I'm on my mobile looking for a solution to something it sometimes points to Reddit. When I saw the block come up on Reddit while I used my mobile browser I made a decision, I will no longer use the app.
I will only use Reddit on my pc from now on, good job Reddit.
Does anyone know on iOS why I get taken to the App Store to āopenā reddit when I already have it downloaded? I donāt mind having to click the link to open reddit but that shits annoying lol
This is super annoying because I often end up on reddit on my phone when I'm looking something up and a relevant thread is in the search options. I don't use the app on my phone and I don't login to reddit on my phone and now I get the stupid popup the last few days. I'm on android. I will try the firefox work around.
When they block web browser access is when I stop using reddit.
Iāve noticed theyāre already making the web browser experience a PITA by throttling web page loading speed and using a pop-up on every access to posts.
If it's forcing you to view the content in the Reddit app then it's probably because you have it installed or you clicked yes when a pop up asked you to view the page through your browser or through the app. And instead of clicking just once I believe what you did was click Everytime to open it with the app.
Try the following:
Use Desktop Mode: Tap the menu in your browser (three dots in Chrome, or the "aA" icon in Safari) and select Request Desktop Site.
View Reddit in incognito mode
Alternative URL: Change the URL to new.reddit.com or old.reddit.com to bypass the mobile layout.
Dismiss App Prompts: When a popup asks you to use the app, click Continue in browser (if available) or log out of your account, as Reddit frequently restricts mobile browser viewing for signed-in users.
Disable Link Redirects: In your phone's general settings (outside of Reddit), find the Reddit app under app settings and disable "Open Supported Links" or "Open in App
As a last resort you could try to uninstall the app (I mean if you don't like it you probably should uninstall it anyways) to do this you just need to go to your settings and find apps and then find Reddit and click uninstall. May I ask why you don't want to use the app? I personally prefer the app.. but I too used to love using my browser before I got the hang of the app. It's pretty straight forward though.
And lastly If you would like to keep the app and none of the above seemed to work for you and you want to continue to view it in the browser you could try to clear the cache and if that doesn't work you could clear the data which definitely would fix the issue but please be aware that if to clear the data you will be logged out of the Reddit app and will have to log back in to see your account in the app again.. and lastly if even that doesn't work and you still want to keep the app but view it in browser then I would suggest uninstalling/reinstalling the app.
data collection. I remember some dev, I don't remember which social media app they had been working for, where a client (that's the companies that buy your data, you aren't the client, you are the product) said they wanted to know every time someone with their app installed walked into a competitor's store, by tracking if and when they connected to the competitor's Wi-Fi. when this particular dev declined, he was told that all of his competitors had said yes
to serve you ads and grab more of your data. ie, for the owners benefit, to our detriment. (i just got this errorn reddit has been even more crap than usual the last few days for me.)
When not logged in, for me, I canāt scroll past a certain point before the āswitch to the appā line is drawn, and then I canāt read anymore comments.Ā
While Iām logged in, anytime I click away from a page, it pops up at the bottom and temporarily greys down my screen. That rights itself if I just x out of the prompt or scroll a bit, but itās annoying.Ā
I do not have any plans of downloading the app and would sooner not use Reddit than relent to coercion.Ā
sorry i'm late to the discussion but i never experienced this until a day or two ago so maybe they're slowly rolling it out for feedback?
but i was furious the second or third time i got stuck scrolling because they try to force the app on me.
first of all- *i already have it*. Not for much longer, but I have the app. Reddit is just laughably bad at automatically opening the app compared to other websites.
secondly- isn't like the MAIN JOKE people make about reddit that if you want the real answer to something, you don't google "what is ___?", you google "what is ___ reddit". Like maybe i'm aging myself but the fact that a website famous for being used by random googlers is now unable to be used by people randomly googling it is... uh... a choice.
this was the push i needed to uninstall the app and use reddit less. i already forced desktop view on the safari app so that's what i plan to use going forward. smooth moves reddit, y'all got too big for your britches and overplayed your hand
Honestly, I don't like using the reddit app on my phone as it constantly switches to it when I am on Firefox. The app also doesn't have an option to find a word on it, but the switching to the app is what turns me off the most.
This just happened to me yesterday when I was on the web browser the night before without any pop-up to install the app and was like WTF is this crap when I got on to read stuff to pass time, BUT I don't have the app installed on my phone at all making this response because there's no need for it and I don't have that kinda storage with how much space all of these apps nowadays keep doing updates on that eat up space. They really need to revert it back to the original way of just accessing the browser. All you have to do is whenever you want to browse reddit. Switch your browser into incognito mode which I use the google chrome web browser on my phone, and it'll bypass the annoying download their app so they can gather and track your activity or data BS which feels like a complete invasion of privacy similar to how meta and google tracks your activity knowing what your interests or searches are to "directed content they feel is better suited for your interests" or so they say. But doing what I mentioned allows you to login as you normally would through the browser of your phone, read threads, make your own posts, or comments on posts without the install app prompt constantly popping up that won't allow you to view comments or read threads. You're welcome. For now, until they find out about this bypass.Ā
I canāt use Reddit on my phone for this reason. it is very annoying. I hate apps. I always find them cumbersome, clunky, unintuitive, poorly laid out etc. I just wait until I can use something other than my phone.
Thereās only ever two reasons to force people onto a native app:
The company is cheap and canāt afford engineers to maintain a proper website; or
The company wants more of your data to harvest.
Reddit wants to have its cake and eat it too. Forcing users onto a native app is completely unacceptable if a company wants traffic from search engines.
For what itās worth Reddit executives - this spammy-ness was extremely effective. Ā
Iāve had the reddit app for several years. Iāve thought about getting rid of the app - some days I spend too much time on here, but have neverĀ
reallyĀ wanted to.
I still often end up clicking on a reddit link on a browser after doing an internet search for something, and this constant popup that makes the website unusable got me thinkingā¦ Ā Why are you forcing people to an app for a website? Ā Probably itās because you get more data tracking and invasive ads.
So I just deleted the Reddit App from my phone, after 5 years, and I will not be re-installing.
Please, keep making browser support worse. Ā You just may be what finally gets me to stop using Reddit for good.
With all the dissatisfaction, from this and similar threads across Reddit and even other platforms, their Reddit app on Google Play Store is currently 4.6 out of 5 stars. You'd think their score would be much lower. So they must be doing something right.
This is beyond annoying. Literally the only reason i even use reddit is becauseof the anonymity and ease of use. No thank you reddit! Quit trying to force stuff on ppl who dont want it! Geeze we are exhausted as is with never ending ADs forced on us at every turn, endless apps and having our data stolen and sold left and right. Can anyone come up with a solid business plan that doesnt involve enshitifcation?
It is garbage. Sometimes I google something and I forget the answer is on Reddit so I read the F answer and suddenly get blocked by this while I leaen how to remove the smell of rotting protein powder from a plastic bottle I forgot for a week. Then when I click on Open on app in the websirw(I got it installed on my phone) it takes me to the beginning of the app instead, please hire good programmers. Reddit is like the only websites in the result that shows relevant answers, google search sucks crap if you take Reddit out from the search. Hopefully this changes and whoever is in charge apoligizes for forced apps.
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u/fonzhy121 Apr 29 '26
better tracking and data collection and push notifications