Reddit @lemmy.world

1y ago

The official reddit app now has more 1 star reviews than 5 star (edit: on the Play store)

108 comments

Most of them will get removed due to ""hate spam"" anyways
- Has already happened. Its on 3.9 again.
  
  Might be location based. Central Canada and it's at 2.6
  
  But they haven't removed the obvious 5 star spam?
  
  2.6 Germany. The 1 star reviews surpass the 5 stars by a lot!
  
  2.6 in Australia
  
  2.9 in australia
  
  oh damn u seem to be in a reddit app country. So far the highest rating in any location
  
  3.0 in the US, just checked right now.
  Total of 2,875,719 reviews.
  
  3.5, Malaysia.
- any evidence for your claims? Certainly I woikd assume it can happen that reviews get removed it you actually just write slurs in the comment but that's just stupid. Other than that I highly doubt google ever removes legit reviews

4.8/5 on the apple store, Lol.
- Most likely paid for those reviews lol
  
  By definition, iPhone owners don't mind paying ridiculous prices for things they can get for free.
- "The new app is broken and frustrating" But they gave it five stars...
  
  Sounds like laptop review I've seen yesterday.
  "Random restarts"
  "Battery doesn't charge"
  5 stars

If you are on an iOS device, be sure to rate the lower starred reviews as “helpful”.
find the app in the App Store
tap show all reviews
sort by most critical, or most recent
long press on a review to select helpful/not helpful
- On Play Store there's a Yes or No "Was this review helpful?" question below each review.
  
  How does this affect the overall rating?

Despite the API protests, the Official Reddit app sucks anyways. It uses a ton more data and battery than third party apps, so I'd never use it again. The app also has a bunch of tracking built in.
- It also stutters like mad even on high end phones. I almost feel like making it work well would have required less effort. No idea why dozens of indie developers all did far better jobs.

Ok, so what's everyone's honest opinion about the app? I've used it once or twice before switching to rif and never used anything else. My wife has been using the official app and says it's "fine". I switched to lemmy after the API fiasco, so I really have no idea how it functions these days. Is it really that dogshit or are people like me just mad?
- Put it like this. I was so mad about losing Sync that I downloaded the reddit app just to give it a 1 star review and then delete it.
  When I downloaded the official reddit app, I found that I had already given it a 1 star review a year or two before this whole situation.
  The official app is and has always been garbage.
- Drinking water is fine, just like the Reddit app is fine. Wait until you try coffee, mango lassi, milk and all the other beverages available.
  Actually no, the Reddit app is actively assaulting you with ads and BS notifications, so it’s more like dirty water and it certainly isn’t fine once you’ve tried clean water. However, I still really like mango lassi, but too bad Reddit chopped down all the mango trees.
  
  I actually prefer water over any drink
- The more I use Lemmy apps (favorite is Infinity), the more I realize what an awful experience the official Reddit app is. It's so sluggish in a subtle way, it makes me tired to scroll. Plus, there's tons of clutter, nothing is where it should be (e.g. r/all is at the very bottom of the left slider menu), and the app behaves in weird little ways (e.g. if you unmute a video, all your videos are now unmuted even if they're autoplaying in the feed).
  Biggest offender is the ads. All over the feed and comments, created on purpose to blend in so you don't immediately realize you're being advertised to. But other than that, the official Reddit app is enshittification by a thousand little shitty design decisions.
- The video player rarely works properly, ads are pretty egregious, it's hard to navigate with so much stuff bloating the UX, there are literal NFTs, and the app is generally much slower in general. And that's just the app itself.
- I patched it using revanced manager to remove ads. But it's a buggy mess. The only good "feature" is inline image comments.
- I guess your wife is also using Windows and a web browser without ad blocker. People get used to having ads and messages thrown in their face constantly.
  But once you try Lemmy, you see how nice things can be.
  
  It's funny how if you browse lemmy, you might be under the impression that Linux is some huge portion of the market share of OS's.
  You know, rather than the reality which is less than 3% of users due to most people just wanting an OS that works without having to have a CS degree.
- Fine is a good description of it. I used to use it and it was fine, not excellent not horrible, just fine. Then after quite some time I looked into 3th party apps, mostly because I got tiered of how all ads became more and more disguised as normal posts.
  I liked Infinity so I stuck with that for some time. Then I switched back to the official one as reading posts on the browser from mobil got worse and worse and I couldn't open the links in Infinity. The official app was ones again fine, a lot worse then Infinity but it was fine.
  Then I figured out that you can make Infinity open reddit links and I switched back to Infinity again.
  Then Reddit did what it did and now I use RedReader to read some communities that didn't move.
- I think it’s a huge battery drain compared to all the alternatives, liftoff for example with Lemmy despite using it just as much as I did the official app in testing consumed less than half the battery life. Apollo also consumed about half of the official Reddit app while using Reddit so I dunno.
  Also the constant promoted posts are just horrible to deal with.
- For me the worse thing is that you are browsing your front page and they add posts from other subs, ads, etc, so at the end it feels you are browsing all. Maybe for some that is not a big deal, but for me it is.
- It was dogshit since release yes
- I was fine with the official app until my main feed got filled with junk from places I didn't want follow or want to follow. Once I switched to a third party app I saw how cluttered the offical app looked and never wanted to switch back.
- por que no los dos?
- It's much slower. And the small font makes it a pain to read long posts and comments.
  
  Oh god does it not even have adjustable font??
- It sucks to use for one reason. The comment chains are difficult to look at since they're not colored (I used Reddit's app months ago so it might have changed).
  
  I find it a little hard here too on my laptop, but I had RES set up to put a 3point line between each comment and their threads.
- For some reason, it was using all the data I had when browsing

I swear I checked last monday and it was 2.6. Damn looks like lot of bots are at work.
- I think the results are regional.
  
  Yea this should be the case because it has well over 3 rating in my region.
  
  Literally where it shows the rating and downloads numbers there is a small "i" for "information", not that difficult to find
  
  Regional and based on your device

This is on the UK Play store.

Reddit app is steaming pile of shit that doesn't get better with time, which is fascinating.
I still use (paid version of) Joey and it still works. The moment it stops working I am ditching Reddit and using Lemmy completely.
- Why wait, tho.
  
  A lot more content on Reddit and more diverse population.
- I was using RIF is fun until today. this morning it just stopped loading anything...so here I am 🤷

Central Europe
And many of the 1 star reviews are really well put with good constructive feedback. So no reason to delete them. Riiight?

Showing 4.8 for me, southern US. I did do my part though!
Edit: if you look at the version history, up until 2 months ago they would describe what each update did. The last 13 updates all say the same thing (iOS):
Thank you for updating the Reddit app! We’ve updated our iOS app with bug fixes and changes to improve your overall experience.
The only difference is that sometimes there’s a bullet point dot at the very beginning depending on how it was copy/pasted that day lol…just awful every which way with no redeeming qualities.

The reviews are fun. The top keywords or phrases have "absolute garbage" which means that collectively, people have assigned the reddit app to absolute garbage. Not garbage, not bad, but "absolute garbage". Fantastic.
- That's the words I used too lol.

I hate how they try to force you into the app from the mobile website now.
No I don't want to use your shitty app. I won't even download it to leave a bad rating.
- In my experience, haven't they always done that?

I did my part just now

In Chile it still shows up with 4 stars 😬🇨🇱

We did it ~~reddit~~ lemmy!

I love democracy

Canada

Not in my store.
- Idk why they are different for everyone...
  
  Apparently based on region and device.
  
  Yup. I've seen a few of these threads, and our Australian store always looks almost identical to the German one.
  I'm starting to wonder if Google is confusing us with Austria.
  
  Especially when the total number of reviews is always the same.
  
  Filtered by language
- It's different depending on your device + location
  
  What it is amusing to me is that I read reviews like "perfect UI" LMAO.

This served as a good reminder for me to check my review and update it.

Nature is healing

I'm doing my part!

I don't think the official app is awful - yet. But It was clear when they jacked up API prices it was about making better software than theirs disappear so they could fill their own with ads, more ads, popups, notifications, privacy infringement and all the rest.
I just deleted it. If I need to access Reddit from a phone, I use an webapp link on the launcher which shows their site through Firefox. Strips out all the ads out too while its at it. I also do the same for Twitter.

I'm not sure if it's just my phone. But I get scroll lag on the official reddit app. It's a total downgrade to the other ones that I used before it!
- The official app is very laggy