Despite the fact that Reddit has been around for about a decade now, the social news site hasn’t had an official app for its users to browse the service on their smartphones, leaving those folks to rely on third-party options. That’s finally changing today, though.
Reddit has officially launched its new mobile app on Android and iPhone. The app does pretty much what you’d expect it to, which is browsing your feed of subreddits that you’ve subscribed to, viewing photos and videos, commenting, and upvoting and downvoting others’ posts. There are inline images, a night theme, and compact and card views for you to choose from.
While the Android and iPhone apps share feature sets, Reddit has tweaked each to fit with the app design of the two platforms. For example, the iPhone app uses a bottom navigation bar with tabs for your front page feed, a list of your subscribed subreddits, your inbox, and your profile. Meanwhile, the Android app has a floating action button (FAB) for posting an image, text, or link, as well as a slide-out menu for navigating between your front page feed, r/All, and your subscriptions.
One other feature that’s worth noting is that if you sign in to your Reddit account using the official app within its first week of availability, you’ll get three months of Reddit Gold for free.
Reddit says that it plans to update its official apps at least once per month, and it promises that it’ll add “a lot of updates and new features” that’ll roll out to mobile users first. If you’ve already got a different Reddit app that you prefer using, it won’t be going away, as Reddit says that it’ll continue to support its free public API.
The official Reddit app looks nice enough, and it’s good to see that the Android and iPhone apps conform to each platform’s app navigation design. Everything feels fast, too, and the app’s small size (around 6MB) means that it’ll download quick and won’t take up a bunch of space on your phone. If you’re a Reddit user, you should give the official app a try, if only to snag your three months of Reddit Gold, which offers ad-free browsing and other perks.
Once you try the official Reddit app, be sure to share your first impressions with us!
