<story><title>Bolt has a cool web interface and they really don&apos;t want you to use it</title><url>https://toot.kuba-orlik.name/@kuba/108503475480137792</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Lucasoato</author><text>I really can&amp;#x27;t understand why Reddit is pushing the app so hard. I mean, keep that as an option, but why creating an awful UX for the mobile web users? You gather more data but the product is worse, less users are staying and you&amp;#x27;re losing value at the end...</text></item><item><author>addicted</author><text>My Reddit usage has basically plummeted to 0 at this point because of their pushing me towards an app.&lt;p&gt;I think there are provable cases where an app almost certainly leads to less retention than more and something like Reddit, whose value lies in allowing you to explore the internet is almost certainly one of them.</text></item><item><author>mojuba</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s an (unverified) myth that retention on mobile apps is better. This is one of those things that marketing people keep telling each other without ever verifying the facts. (Unless you deliberately make the web version inferior, of course.)&lt;p&gt;The reasoning behind it is that you should take real estate on the user&amp;#x27;s home screen at all costs, because your app&amp;#x27;s icon will serve as a reminder and people will allegedly come back to it and open more often.&lt;p&gt;But what matters at the end of the day is the product and the value it brings to the users. I&amp;#x27;d argue that deceiving the users to provide real estate for your app does not help your business in the long term. If you get more installs today by coercing them (like Reddit does, for example) you will most definitely see some other metric such as retention decline over time.&lt;p&gt;Broadly, users - us that is - are not idiots. Deception works momentarily and can have an immediate effect on some metrics. Long term though, every user and no matter how smart or dumb, will eventually assess the value it gets them against the money, against their time, or against the &amp;quot;home screen real estate&amp;quot; they provided.&lt;p&gt;Speaking from my own experience with multiple mobile apps: there are many ways you can trick the users but you can&amp;#x27;t trick the longer terms statistics.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>propogandist</author><text>You drive high ad revenue with their mobile app, with all the data mining. The old reddit experience was destroyed to drive ad revenue, they don’t care about UX.&lt;p&gt;also, beware of reddit URLs bouncing through out.reddit.com — which tracks all link clicks on reddit across mobile and desktop (profiling interests), regardless of login state</text></comment>
<story><title>Bolt has a cool web interface and they really don&apos;t want you to use it</title><url>https://toot.kuba-orlik.name/@kuba/108503475480137792</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Lucasoato</author><text>I really can&amp;#x27;t understand why Reddit is pushing the app so hard. I mean, keep that as an option, but why creating an awful UX for the mobile web users? You gather more data but the product is worse, less users are staying and you&amp;#x27;re losing value at the end...</text></item><item><author>addicted</author><text>My Reddit usage has basically plummeted to 0 at this point because of their pushing me towards an app.&lt;p&gt;I think there are provable cases where an app almost certainly leads to less retention than more and something like Reddit, whose value lies in allowing you to explore the internet is almost certainly one of them.</text></item><item><author>mojuba</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s an (unverified) myth that retention on mobile apps is better. This is one of those things that marketing people keep telling each other without ever verifying the facts. (Unless you deliberately make the web version inferior, of course.)&lt;p&gt;The reasoning behind it is that you should take real estate on the user&amp;#x27;s home screen at all costs, because your app&amp;#x27;s icon will serve as a reminder and people will allegedly come back to it and open more often.&lt;p&gt;But what matters at the end of the day is the product and the value it brings to the users. I&amp;#x27;d argue that deceiving the users to provide real estate for your app does not help your business in the long term. If you get more installs today by coercing them (like Reddit does, for example) you will most definitely see some other metric such as retention decline over time.&lt;p&gt;Broadly, users - us that is - are not idiots. Deception works momentarily and can have an immediate effect on some metrics. Long term though, every user and no matter how smart or dumb, will eventually assess the value it gets them against the money, against their time, or against the &amp;quot;home screen real estate&amp;quot; they provided.&lt;p&gt;Speaking from my own experience with multiple mobile apps: there are many ways you can trick the users but you can&amp;#x27;t trick the longer terms statistics.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>usrn</author><text>Push notifications. Once someone is hooked on the site a notification can get them back into the dopamine feedback loop very easily. I think this is why restaurant chains have started giving people free food to install their apps too (along with all the data they can sell now.)&lt;p&gt;I think smartphones would be much less popular if people understood why corporations love &amp;quot;apps&amp;quot; so much. It&amp;#x27;s nothing like the older PC world full of software more or less for its own sake.</text></comment>