The Best Apps and Extensions You Should Install If You Use Reddit
Reading Time: 4 minutesThese alternative apps will help you avoid the Facebook-ification of Reddit.
Reddit is one of the few social media websites that allows you to develop full-fledged apps for the service. That’s why you’ll find lots of high-quality Reddit apps on the App Store and the Google Play Store. And in many ways, these third-party apps are better than the official Reddit experience.
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There are many things Reddit doesn’t do well. The video player is a mess because it often takes ages to load; it hides URL previews, so you never know what you’re clicking on (maybe it’s funny when you get rickrolled for the 5,000th time, but you won’t be cackling if you click an NSFW link at work); Reddit is big on GIFs but you can’t scrub through GIFs to pause at the right moment; and don’t even get me started about the shitty ads and the useless search box on the site.
Of late, Reddit’s focus has been more towards adding Facebook-style features, including infinite scrolling, showing you who else is online, and how many people are commenting in real time. If you are uncomfortable with all this, you should consider using the best third-party apps and browser extensions for Reddit. We’ve narrowed it down so that you can choose what works for you.
Apollo (iPhone)
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If you have an iPhone, you won’t find a better Reddit app than Apollo. It does all the basics right—Reddit loads fast, posting and commenting are super quick, and you won’t see any ads. Apollo excels at providing quality-of-life features that tremendously improve your browsing experience.
One of these is the ability to highlight new Reddit accounts—to help you quickly spot attempts at brigading, trolling, or low-quality comments. It also lets you disable infinite scrolling, which goes a long way towards helping you reduce your social media addiction. Apollo can also automatically collapse all replies to top-level comments, hide AutoModerator comments, and allow you to scrub GIFs.
Apollo is updated frequently with new features you didn’t even know you needed, which is why you should give it a shot. There are two premium tiers in the app that unlock its best features—Apollo Pro ($4.99) and Apollo Ultra ($0.99 per month). Apollo Ultra is for those who need notifications, but pretty much everything else is available with Apollo Pro.
Narwhal (iPhone)
If you like the old Reddit design and want something that makes it work on your iPhone, Narwhal is the perfect choice. Narwhal is extremely configurable. It lets you decide if you want to automatically mark posts as read, and can also exclude NSFW posts from this setting. The app lets you save sorting preferences on a per-subreddit level and lets you decide if you want to collapse stickied comments, AutoModerator comments, and child comments. The more you explore this app, the more you’ll like it.
Narwhal is free and just shows one ad towards the bottom of the screen, which you can remove for $3.99. The only downside is that Narwhal isn’t updated very frequently, and, although it’s stable, it doesn’t get new features as often as some of its rivals.
Reddit Enhancement Suite (desktop)
On desktop, you’d be doing yourself a disservice if you don’t try Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES). It’s a browser plugin for Reddit, and is available on all major browsers for free. RES gives you features like fully customizable keyboard shortcuts for all your favorite Reddit actions, the ability to change the subreddits in the top bar on Reddit, and lovely little highlights for important users in the thread—such as the OP, administrators, friends, or moderators.
RES gets rid of a significant amount of Reddit annoyances. You can hide child comments by default, hide your username when logged in to Reddit, and even click the Spam button to report comments quickly.
Boost (Android)
Boost is one of the best Reddit apps for Android. Its focus is on design. If you want an app that follows Material Design principles, or if you’re after a slick Android app for Reddit, Boost is a great choice. It’s got great post-filtering tools, so you can choose to show or hide posts with photos or videos, for example.
You can also set a different viewing mode for each subreddit, which Boost has some great modes for. There’s an image gallery mode that makes it easy to browse different posts in photo-heavy subreddits, and a slideshow view that lets you swipe in either direction to move to the next or previous post.
Joey (Android)
Joey has lots of good features, but the best one is the ability to download videos off Reddit—it’s a nice feature for those who have spotty internet while commuting. It also supports Reddit Live, a feature that lets people livestream videos on Reddit. Apart from these unique features, Joey lets you view AMA (ask me anything) posts in a magazine-style format and it has a nice customizable comment collapse feature.
Honorable mentions
There are way too many good Reddit apps for mobile, and each app has something unique that makes it worth trying. If our top recommendations don’t cut it for you, try one of these:
- Infinity (Android): This app is free, has no ads, and features a beautiful design for Reddit. Its best feature is a Lazy Mode that automatically scrolls through Reddit. If you are tired of scrolling non-stop, this app can do the job for you.
- RIF Is Fun (Android): RIF is one of the most popular Reddit apps on Android and does a great job optimizing Reddit’s old design for mobile. It used to be called Reddit Is Fun before this new rebranding that is…hard to make sense of.
- Relay (Android): Relay has a nice design and lets you seamlessly switch between a link and its corresponding Reddit discussion. If you click a lot of links on Reddit, Relay may be a good fit for you.
- Slide (iPhone, Android): Slide is available both on Android and iPhone, and it brings Material Design to both platforms, and it lets you download all of the stuff in your feed for offline viewing.