Today, Reddit has released its long-awaited apps for iOS and Android, which are the first apps the company has built in-house. If you've been eagerly waiting for an official app, Reddit wants you to believe that this is now the best way to explore the site's content, even as there are plenty of great third-party clients available.
The company has been beta-testing these apps with a select group of people for a while now, and today the apps are finally available to download from the Google Play Store and Apple's App Store. For those of you who are using Alien Blue (a third party client acquired by Reddit in 2014), know that you'll still be able to use the app, but development focus will shift towards the new apps and Alien Blue will no longer be available to download moving forward.
While the initial plan was to use Alien Blue as a starting point for an official Reddit client, Reddit’s Alex Le explained that the project became so big that it eventually required to build a separate app from scratch, and the company believes that this also made it possible to make a “faster, more modern and more usable” app. 
If you're wondering what the official app has to offer in terms of features, there are a few key differences when compared to third-party clients. First, you can customize it with themes, including a "night mode", as you can see in the image to the right.
Le says that this is just one of the things that carried over from Alien Blue, and another is the ability to set the app to either show a compact view for quickly digesting all the bits, or to display a "card view" for savoring rich media content.
The app also has a few platform-specific features, such as the draggable “speed-read” button on iOS. In addition to this, the developers have included the ability for moderators to customize the look and feel of subreddits, so users can enjoy an improved and unique experience when compared to the website.
It's important to note that the new app is designed to be easy and quick to upgrade with new features and improvements, as more than half of Reddit's audience uses mobile devices to access the site. It's also lightweight, so it doesn't eat through users' cellular data plans, and it should install even faster than Alien Blue.
Have you downloaded the official Reddit app? Let us know your experience in the comments section below.
Source: TechCrunch
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