I’m desktop-only user and never had any experience with Reddit/Lemmy apps, and the sentiment towards them confuzes me.
I can imagine that the third-party apps for Reddit were better (?not bugged?) than the official one. But what made you to love them? Was the experience even better than desktop use?

Feel free to write about both Reddit and Lemmy apps in your responses.

  • @TheBananaKing
    9•1 year ago

    I’m oldschool, I used old reddit on the desktop, and when I was on my phone, I’d use old reddit, in a browser, desktop site.

    Pinch to zoom was the massive feature missing from all the apps. My close vision isn’t quite what it was, so my optimal font size for detail reading is a bit bigger than for headline-skimming - and skimming with large fonts is a horrible experience; the information density goes to shit, and everything is whitespace.

    So I want to be able to zoom on text when I want to read in detail, and out again when browsing. And I want it in one seamless gesture that I can change from second to second without having to think about it, not laboriously drilling down into settings menus and completely disrupting the flow. Pinch zoom in the desktop site did precisely what I wanted, and every mobile site or app goes to enormous lengths to disable it :(

    I just don’t like any apps very much. They always feel claustrophobic, dumbed down and over-curated, like I’ve got a sales assistant breathing down my neck trying to sell me an experience instead of just letting me loose to browse. Let me see the fucking URL. Let me copy and paste whatever the fuck I want to, using the system facilities. Stop reinventing the wheel with UI and UX. It’s text, images and buttons; we have an app for that, it’s called a browser, and a million times the development you’ll ever be able to muster has gone into getting the interface general-purpose, effective and predictable.

    Yes I’m genx, shut up.