The Best Apps and Extensions You Should Install If You’re Using Reddit
Reddit is one of the few social networks that allows you to develop full-fledged applications for the service. That’s why you’ll find plenty of high-quality Reddit apps on the App Store and Google Play Store. And in many ways, these third-party apps are better than the official Reddit experience.
There are a lot of things that Reddit doesn’t do very well. The video player is a mess because it often takes forever to load; it hides the URL preview so you never know what you’re clicking on (maybe it’s funny when you get rickrolled for the 5000th time, but you won’t cackle if you click on an NSFW link at work); Reddit is good at GIFs, but you can’t scroll through GIFs to pause at the right moment; and don’t even get me started on the crappy ads and useless search box on the site.
Recently, Reddit has been focusing more on adding Facebook-style features, including an infinite scroll showing who else is online and how many people are commenting in real time. If you don’t like all of this, then you should consider using the best third-party apps and browser extensions for Reddit. We’ve narrowed it down so you can choose what’s right for you.
Apollo (iPhone)
If you have an iPhone, you won’t find a better Reddit app than Apollo . It does all the basics right: Reddit loads quickly, posting and commenting is very fast, and you won’t see any ads. Apollo excels at delivering quality features that greatly enhance your browsing experience.
One of them is the ability to highlight new Reddit accounts to help you quickly spot brigade attempts, trolling, or low-quality comments. It also allows you to turn off infinite scroll, which will help you reduce your addiction to social media. Apollo can also automatically collapse all replies to top-level comments, hide AutoModerator comments, and allow you to clean up GIFs.
Apollo is frequently updated with new features you didn’t even know existed, so you should give it a try. The app has two premium tiers 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 in Apollo Pro.
Narwhal (iPhone)
If you like the old Reddit design and want something that will make it work on your iPhone, Narwhal is the perfect choice. Narwhal is extremely customizable. It lets you decide if you want to automatically mark messages as read and can also exclude NSFW messages from this setting. The app lets you save per-subreddit sorting settings and decide if you want to collapse sticky comments, AutoModerator comments, and child comments. The more you explore this app, the more you will like it.
Narwhal is free and only shows one ad at the bottom of the screen, which you can remove for $3.99. The only downside is that Narwhal doesn’t get updated very often, and while it’s stable, it doesn’t get new features as often as some of its competitors.
Reddit Enhancement Suite (Desktop)
On desktop, you’re doing yourself a disservice if you don’t try the Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES). This is a browser plugin for Reddit that is available in all major browsers for free. RES gives you features like fully customizable keyboard shortcuts for all your favorite Reddit activities, the ability to change subreddits in the Reddit top bar, and nice little highlights for important users in the thread like OPs, admins, friends, or moderators.
RES gets rid of a significant amount of Reddit irritants. You can hide child comments by default, hide your username when logging into Reddit, and even hit the Spam button to quickly report comments.
Boost (Android)
Boost is one of the best Reddit apps for Android. His focus is on design. If you want an app that follows the principles of Material Design, or if you want a beautiful Android app for Reddit, Boost is a great choice. It has great post-filtering tools so you can show or hide posts with photos or videos, for example.
You can also set different view modes for each subreddit, for which Boost has some great views. There’s an image gallery mode that makes it easy to browse through various posts in photo-rich subreddits, and a slideshow view that lets you swipe in any direction to go to the next or previous post.
Joey (Android)
Joey has a lot of good features, but the best one is the ability to download videos from Reddit, which is a nice feature for those who have internet problems while commuting. It also supports Reddit Live, a feature that allows people to stream videos live on Reddit. In addition to these unique features, Joey allows you to view AMA posts (ask me anything) in log format and has a handy 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 checking out. If our best recommendations don’t work for you, try one of them:
- Infinity (Android): This is a free, ad-free and beautifully designed app for Reddit. Its best feature is its lazy mode, which scrolls Reddit automatically. If you’re tired of continuous scrolling, this app can do the job for you.
- RIF is fun (Android): RIF is one of the most popular Reddit apps for Android and does a great job of streamlining the old Reddit design for mobile. It used to be called Reddit Is Fun before this new rebrand, which is… hard to understand.
- Relay (Android): Relay has a nice design and makes it easy to switch between a link and a related Reddit discussion. If you click a lot of links on Reddit, Relay might be right for you.
- Slide ( iPhone , Android ): Available on both Android and iPhone, Slide supports Material Design on both platforms and allows you to download all content from your feed for offline viewing.