Hands on with Reddit’s new smartphone app

finefsloines · Scavanger Joined: 27 Apr 2014 Posts: 7

“Finally” is one of those words that gets overused in tech news stories, but I think it’s fair to say that it’s taken a pretty long time for Reddit to release its first official, native apps for iOS and Android.

Until now, the company has made do with Alien Blue, which started out as a third-party app before being acquired by Reddit in 2014. But as Sarah Perez reported this morning, the company’s engineering team decided rebuild the app from scratch to make it “faster, more modern and more usable.”

In the video above, I do a quick runthrough of the app. As with most other news apps, the content probably matters more than any individual features, but there are some things worth showing off, like the way the navigation has been redesigned for mobile, the new image view and the app’s overall speed — which is great until you’re trying to follow a link to another site and everything suddenly slows down.
You can download the iOS and Android apps here.