We're now available in the US, Canada, UK, and Australia. Launching apps in other countries requires a little bit more diligence than just making a website available globally.
I'm sorry it's not available in your country -- we're planning on getting it out everywhere.
Your failure here is not that you are not making it available, but that you failed to communicate this limit in ability.
The flow for me was "hey neat", click link to reddit page, "ok, this looks good", click link to google play store, click green Install button, 'none of your devices are compatible', "what in the ever-loving ...?", go to hn comments, "oh goddamn, not again".
That could've been MUCH shorter and MUCH less confusing if the title up here ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11447273 ) said: "Announcing Reddit for iOS and Android in NA/UK/AUS" and at the very least having a text below the appstore/playstore buttons stating this.
Have some empathy please.
Edit: Going "Hello World!" in the "What's New" section also doesn't help matters.
I remember Google doing the same thing when they launched their "Chromebooks are for everyone" ad campaign - you could only purchase one in the UK or the US.
It's like companies are actively trying to annoy the region's they geo-block.
No, it's like what's actually true - that they don't think about those places and therefore do things like write slogans with the mindset that such people don't exist.
Google still loves doing this with Chromebooks. They have human-translated marketing websites for the Pixel in Norway and their buy button is just greyed out.
Additionally, it's highly unlikely that potential users will bother continuously checking to determine if the restriction on their region has yet been lifted - given that they can continue to use the competition. Tomorrow I will have forgotten about this app.
This should have been sorted out before the launch.
They claim they are committed to supporting that free API[1]. And if they kill it, it would also kill all those reddit bots. There would be a massive outrage since many large subreddits rely on them for advanced automated moderation. There's AutoMod which they've integrated, but it's often not enough.
Query. Is the borking of RSS feeds last couple months related? It was done so poorly(still borked despite assurances contrary)? Would be quite a convenient way to herd a bunch of RSS users to sign up PDQ to keep their TIL & ELI5 fetishes uninterupted.
I'm afraid I did the opposite, however. I don't need a new app, and again contrarily, I don't need a new feed reader. My worthless trivia supeepowers are indeed in decline. Meh.
Can you share what is involved with this effort? It would be educational to the HackerNews community that is (understandably) quite angry at this decision. You can turn this into an educational effort on the state of app distribution.
Frankly, I have a hard time believing that your team couldn't have done this due diligence upfront, considering how rare it is that I encounter apps in my daily use that do not work seamlessly. I moved from North America to Europe 1 year ago, so this is something I have a lot of experience with. You could help me and others understand this better.
I'm sorry, but as an occasional iOS developer, and seeing the amount of Portuguese users you guys have on Reddit, I find it hard to take that at face value. Is it the localised blurb you need? Crowdsource it.
It probably has to do with advertising. The purpose of this app is to monetize the mobile users and they can't make money off users in countries where the ads can't be shown (for whatever reason).
Yeah it's weird. They used this word again in the official announcement thread so clearly they've got a position they want their employees (and Alexis) to take, a fantastically vague corporate one at that.
Congrats and all the best with the book! Happy to participate and hope it can help get my experiences with Reddit, Hipmunk and beyond into as many people's heads as possible.
Thanks! I would too love to spread those stories to new audiences. We are really trying to branch out beyond the startup world but are honestly new to it and unsure so far what will work. So any ideas from you or anyone would be appreciated! Open to try almost anything :). Also, unjust sent you a DM on Twitter about a related matter.
Thanks. Yep, they're separate, but based on the success of the Upvoted podcast and newsletter over this year, we definitely see the potential of upvoted.com to be a gateway to get new users into Reddit. One reason why, for instance, we have a link to a comment section on r/upvoted at the bottom of every article (each Upvoted.com gets automatically submitted to r/upvoted upon posting).
Yo Alexis - was the main logic behind starting this the fact that so many other sites are using Reddit UGC to drive their content machines (and thus revenues)?
Oops, I did see that first but my initial uncaffeinated impression was that it was the intro for advertisers rather than users, what with the open rates and the click throughs and the numbers.
One the more entertaining/interesting things about original subreddit content is that it often gets fleshed out, corrected (occasionally to a full 180˚) and otherwise improved by further contributions. I'm curious how upvoted deals with that. Perhaps your editor could do an AMA sometime after things settle down post-launch.
