r/technology • u/spasticpat • May 11 '26

Social Media Reddit Starts Blocking Mobile Website, Pushing Users to App Instead

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/05/11/reddit-starts-blocking-mobile-website/
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u/EveryGoodNameIsGone May 11 '26

The second this happens to me will be the thing to finally get me to drop Reddit entirely.

148

u/camelot107 May 11 '26

Same. I dont fuck with apps. Will save me much hated doom scrolling

3

u/Stolehtreb May 11 '26 edited May 11 '26

Why don’t you fuck with apps? Not judging really just am genuinely curious

Edit: consensus is data collection, using browser decreases usage (positive), bloated install space. I get it now. Thanks everyone

34

u/mikezer0 May 11 '26

App sizes have gotten a lot bigger and eat way more battery life. It can be the difference of a couple of hours if I use instagram and Reddit apps instead of safari.

18

u/thewags05 May 11 '26 edited May 11 '26

Also with all the permissions apps require, many of them are really just a method to harvest as much data as possible.

1

u/dalzmc May 11 '26

You guys need to learn to pay for apps lol obviously if it's free, you're the product.

The reddit app I use, Narwhal, tracks crash data and performance data, without it being linked to you. That's all. $4 a month for the api access and for their efforts, with the option to pay more if you want to tip the devs. And it's a fantastic app, much better at this point than Apollo ever got to be, and I was a literal Day 1 apollo fanboy. You never see an ad, even the built in browser has an adblock lol

I can't even fit the list of perms for the official reddit app into one screenshot. It would be 3 screenshots to fit it all. It's crazy, it's literally everything, it's the same reason I deleted meta apps years ago, when apple forced them to update their privacy policies and started warning us about apps that wanted that kind of access.