It's not about the ads. I wouldn't mind seeing ads in my third party app of choice if it kept reddit "free". The problem is, the official app is horrendous; unusably bad. It's equivalent to comparing the web redesign with old.reddit.
Specific issues from when I used it for a bit to create image posts a year ago:
- On my screen size, it was incredibly hard to navigate the profile. The profile header covered over half the screen
- Notifications were often bugged
- You can only have one thing open at once - no way to quickly toggle between two pages. Apollo at least has four buttons in the bottom you can use to go to seperate pages
- It was extremely laggy
- It sends notifications by default for random junk ("your post got one upvote!!!" "check out this trending subreddit;!!!") and at least once there was a server bug where it ignored me having turned those off and sent marketing notifications anyway
The real issue for me is it just feels bad to use. Everything lags, it constantly loses my place, ...
new.reddit was nice, I was using it back in the beta period. But it's so slow. It's barely usable. Opening a reddit thread from google if I'm not signed in shows like three comments and a bunch of random unrelated junk. Opening new reddit when I am signed in just feels slow. Every action pauses for a moment to do a bunch of react rerenders.
I don't know if they've fixed it by now but back two years ago it was doing react rerenders of practically the whole page while moving the mouse.
Using the mobile app feels similarly bad to using new.reddit
