Reddit Previews A New Mobile Website, Throws Dig At Apple

After increasing frustration in dealing with Apple’s app review process, the folks behind Reddit have released a beta of its new mobile website, which basically looks to kill its 99 cents iPhone app.

According to the site’s press release the new site will include:

Unlike the iphone app or old mobile, it's designed to work on anything that has a touch screen (android, iPad, that thing you put together in your basement).

On listing pages, we've added infinite scrolling to save on page refreshes.

On comment pages, we've cut the thread depth to five for now. The small screen makes longer threads hard to follow.

The button bar on each post has been moved into a pop-over toolbar to save screen real estate

The arrows are 50% larger, meaning that properly clicking them will no longer rely on instantaneous Brownian motion of you and your device

Although Reddit continues to make available its iPhone app, it is clear that further updates to that product are unlikely, based on  this jab at Apple:

Mostly, dealing with the app store is a royal pain in the ass...As such, our development is based around the radical notion that we can deploy bugfixes to site problems in less than a fortnight. This is not the case with the app store (quite the contrary actually).

The new site relies on the WebKit, so it will work perfectly well (as betas go) with Safari and Chrome browsers, although others browsers might see slight issues or limits.  Users that would like to test out the new site should visit http://www.i.reddit.com on their iPhone. Reddit is owned by Conde Nast Publications and released its first iPhone app in early 2009.   The site allow users to post stories which are then given thumbs up or down, depending on how well readers like the story.

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