Reddit is SO irritating with it's constant push to have you download their app. There's nothing on the site that requires it—Reddit is just listed content of text, video, images, and links. They also limit what you can post from their mobile site which I believe is just further pressure to get you into their unnecessary app.
If you're on iOS, try Apollo. It's a third party Reddit app and it's outstanding. Top-notch user experience and an engaged and friendly developer.
More on topic: I'm curious why we tolerate these horrible experiences on the web. Technically savvy people can't be the only ones infuriated by these dark patterns, yet I don't often see my non-tech friends complaining about it.
I also don't understanding the motive on Reddit's part. Let's broadly categorize users into two buckets: those who actively don't want to use the app, and those that do.
In most cases a native app experience "feels" better than a web app experience, so your average user is probably happy to see the "please use our app instead" popup. Those users will probably click it on the first try, and never have to deal with it again on the web.
The remainder who specifically want to use the browser version are doing so probably for technical reasons: don't want to be tracked, etc. Those people are never going to click to download the app, no matter how many times Reddit nags at them to do it. So why continue to force-feed the popup? All it's doing is creating ill will from the people who see it every time, and those people are arguably the more technically savvy and know it's intentionally being annoying. It's just making technical people dislike the platform and the company.
I guess I'm missing where the benefit of trying to force people into the app is. Is the disdain from techies worth the tiny amount of people who initially click no and then eventually click yes?
But my god, they are SO pushy.