Item: Milkeddit
Rating: 7.0
Author: Christine Chan

Milkeddit ($1.99) by Shihab Mehboob is an app for browsing reddit. If you are in search of a powerful and feature-filled way to browse reddit on your iPhone after reddit seems to have ruined Alien Blue, then Milkeddit could be the app you’ve been looking for. It joins the ranks of other fine reddit apps, including narwhal.

Whenever I’m bored, I gravitate towards reddit. Yes, I know — there will be some of you who may think of reddit as a “cesspool” on the Internet, but I’m pretty sure you may be thinking of 4chan. While there are certainly some bad parts of reddit (just like the rest of the Internet, actually), there are plenty of good parts to it as well, especially if you find some friendly and informative subreddits (individual communities on reddit) to subscribe to. I’ll admit, I will browse my subreddits for hours, since it’s pretty easy to lose myself in the rabbit hole of interesting topics, pictures, and links. While I originally was a big fan of Alien Blue when it first came out several years ago, I noticed that it got worse and worse after reddit bought it and made some changes. So then I moved over to narwhal, which has received many numerous improvements over the past year, making it my new favorite reddit client. However, I was saw Milkeddit on Product Hunt a few days ago and I was intrigued, since it definitely looked like it had potential to dethrone narwhal for me. But after putting it to the test for the past several days, I still think Milkeddit has the potential, but needs some more work before I’ll be replacing narwhal with it.

In terms of visuals, Milkeddit looks pretty good for a reddit app. It comes with three default themes that you can choose from, and everything is neatly organized on the main page when you choose the account you want to use (yes, it has multiple account support). The app is fairly responsive to touch, so it should not be a problem to get where you want to be, and there are some delightful, bouncy animations that get shown off throughout the app, such as when you change themes or access various settings. For those with larger phones, you’ll be pleased to know that Milkeddit has a toolbar at the bottom with options for things like keyword search, mute filters, new post, gallery, and subreddit options.

However, if you are like me and subscribe to a lot of different forums and like to switch out frequently, you have to manually go back to the previous screen to access your subreddits, or enter a subreddit, view the front page, and other things. Personally, I don’t like this method and prefer narwhal’s right-handed side panel that you can easily access from anywhere with just a swipe. Having to manually go back to previous views just to switch subreddits or pages is tedious and annoying, so hopefully the developer changes or optimizes this in the future.

Another thing I noticed is the fact that even if you just use one account, Milkeddit likes to start you off at the account selection screen on each launch, even after you come back to the app from the multitasking menu. I believe this is because it wants to show you the “how many posts you’ve visited in the past week” graph at the bottom, but for me this is unnecessary and just means an extra step to get to my content. If I only have one account logged in, the app should just take me to my account page by default, so that way I can just quickly get to where I want to go. Each account page will have various sections for content, such as: Front Page, All Subreddits, Multireddits, Subscribed Subreddits, Default Subreddits, Bookmarked Subreddits, and the option to manually enter a subreddit or user. You’ll also be able to see if you have any unread messages in your inbox, as well as messages you’ve sent to others.

No matter what content you’re looking at, Milkeddit organizes the list of posts in a neat and organized fashion. You’re able to see the thread titles, excerpts of the post body, link source, number of upvotes and comments, the user who submitted the post, and even thumbnails (square or circle thumbnails on either the left or right side, depending on how you chose the settings) if applicable. If you prefer to filter posts by what is Hot, New, Top, or Controversial, just tap on the filter button in the top right corner and select your choice. Some of them have other options like the time period, giving you more flexibility of choice.

One thing that I have missed from Alien Blue was the gallery feature, which has been included in Milkeddit. To access it, just tap on the photo icon in the bottom navigation toolbar, and you get to see all of the images in a subreddit or front page at once. Tapping an image takes you directly to the post.

While the gallery feature is nice, it doesn’t quite make up for the fact that Milkeddit does not display link previews directly in the thread, which is a feature I love in narwhal. Instead, you’ll have to tap on the links to view them in the in-app browser, and then you can’t even swipe to go back — you have to tap on the “back” button in the top left corner, which is annoying on devices like the iPhone 6s Plus. Perhaps it is because I’m so used to narwhal, but I truly think having a preview of the link in the thread that you can swipe down to view the full link is much more intuitive than separating the thread from the link. There is image previews, though, but they load very slowly compared to narwhal.

As you’re in a thread, there’s a toolbar underneath the main post that lets you upvote, downvote, bookmark, and more. You can also swipe left on a comment or even a thread in the post listing to reveal a contextual menu, which has options for upvote, downvote, bookmark, and the rest. Again, while this works, I also prefer narwhal’s system of a short swipe to upvote (from right) or save (from left) and long swipe to downvote (from right) or hide (from left). Swipes just feel more intuitive and less button-tapping is always a plus.

The search functionality falls a bit short as well. When you tap on the magnifying glass, it will bring up the search bar and you’ll see “Search {{subreddit}}” in it, which you would think means that you just get results within the subreddit that you’re currently in. However, I’ve tried searches with different keywords in the Apple Watch subreddit, for example, and got results from pretty much all of reddit, which is not what I want. You can also just type in your search terms and wait for results to populate, or manually tap the “Search” button the keyboard after you’ve typed in the terms you want, but either way, the results are different. It’s not consistent, and rather confusing — how do I view the results that are just contained in the subreddit I’m in? Narwhal does an excellent job with search for all of reddit and in specific subreddits, so it’s a bit disappointing to see Milkeddit’s search just all over the place.

When I am on reddit, I’m mostly just browsing and lurking, replying to a thread every now and then. I don’t post new threads, but if you do, there is the option in Milkeddit. It has you enter in things one-by-one by showing one thing at a time: Title, Subreddit, Body (Link or Text), and then the Captcha, before it is submitted. I like this, as it means you shouldn’t get anything wrong, but again, I don’t usually submit new posts.

Another issue I had with Milkeddit was the fact that somehow, the entire navigation bar at the bottom suddenly disappeared on me, and I was not able to get it back, no matter how many times I quit the app and restarted it. The only way that got it back was deleting Milkeddit and then reinstalling it. I’m not sure what caused the bar to go away, since I had the “Sticky Navigation Bar” setting turned on, but it vanished and I had a moment of frustration trying to figure out why. On top of that, the app has crashed on me a few times, and I dislike that it never remembers where I was on my last use, so it throws me back at the account selection screen every time I come back to the app.

I wanted to like Milkeddit, but at the moment it just seems too buggy and counterintuitive in some aspects. I do like the design and the animations in the app, but at the moment, narwhal does everything I need it to do, but much faster and better than what Milkeddit does. Again, I think that Milkeddit has potential, but more work needs to be put into it to make it much more polished than what it is right now.

At the moment, I can’t fully recommend Milkeddit until performance improves with updates. But if you want to give it a try for yourself, Milkeddit can be found on the iPhone App Store for $1.99. Narwhal, the other reddit app I’ve mentioned throughout the review, is available as a universal download for the iPhone and iPad, and is free with an in-app purchase of $2.99 to unlock Narwhal Pro (well worth it).