*This is an Android only app*
I reddit a ton, often spending hours on end scrolling through r/aww or r/askreddit in my quest to procrastinate as much as possible and to avoid responsibility. As a result, I reddit when on the can, when commuting on the metro, when having a one on one meeting with people and while writing this weeks AotW.
Sadly, there’s one thing about “the frontpage of the internet” that’s always bugged me and other smartphone users around the world and across all demographics: there was no mobile website for reddit. For ages you had your m.facebook.com and your m.twitter.com but sadly no m.reddit.com. The situation thankfully got rectified in April with the introduction of Reddit’s new beta mobile site and while the beta site is surprisingly not terrible, I doubt it will live up to the dozens of apps that filled in the void before it came along.
This week I’m looking at one of those apps, Now for Reddit, a beautiful piece of coding that lets me find great cat pictures to spam my friends with. Opening it up for the first time loads up r/frontpage, giving you quick update of what’s trending across all the subreddits that make up this fantastic social media platform. Having seen that the day’s number one trending topic was the path a pilot took to avoid a storm, I quickly swiped left once to visit r/dubai, the subreddit dedicated to the emirate I’m currently melting in (where I read about a man punching an Emirates flight attendant on the way to Melbourne) and swiped left once more to intensely read up on r/politics while failing in my attempts to eat cereal. Apparently the head of the Louisiana GOP was among those exposed in the Ashley Madison data breach earlier this week.
The intuitive interface is one of the main reasons I love Now for Reddit, swiping left and right switches me between subreddits faster than I can think of great comments to hoard that karma. Furthermore, opening the sidebar and selecting the subscriptions option lets you decide the order of which your subreddits are placed, personalising your Now for Reddit so that you don’t have to swipe right twenty times to get to r/showerthoughts. You can also use multireddits, a feature Now for Reddit supports, to cram a bunch of your favourite subreddits into one single multireddit. I used this feature to create a multireddit made up of very small, often looked over subreddits, ensuring that I could see all the posts made without it being swamped by a larger subreddit.
Another great feature is the ability to view gifs, Imgur images and open up links all within Now for Reddit, saving on the time it would take to redirect you to Google Chrome, thereby letting you watch more gifs of cats being cats and doing cat-ty things. In addition to loading up still pictures you can also load up videos bypassing the need to load up the YouTube app on your smartphone or tablet. Furthermore, Now for Reddit supports Reddit TV, letting you watch movies, documentaries, sports and listen to music on the go! You can also view your Reddit inbox using the app, allowing you to see all your username mentions as well as your messages, sent or received.
The text editor is surprisingly powerful for such a small app, letting you post pictures, make bullet-points and so on, making posting quirky comments and messages a breeze.
Yes there are other great Reddit apps out there on the Play Store such as BaconReader, but Now for Reddit caught my eye in a way those other apps couldn’t. Maybe it was the simplistic and easy to design interface or perhaps it was the fact that I didn’t have to open other apps when interacting with links and pictures. All I know is that I’ll have this particular app pinned to my home screen for eternity.
