Apple / news / REDDIT
REVIEW
Reddit's iPhone app works fine and that is the entire problem.
Three years after the API price hike killed Apollo and Narwhal, the official client has caught up on speed and still feels nothing like the one users actually wanted.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 10, 2026 · 4 MIN READ
For most of a decade, the answer to “what’s the best Reddit app on iPhone” was not Reddit. Apollo, Narwhal, RIF, Reddit is Fun — the third-party clients did the reading experience the way readers wanted it, and Reddit Inc. did the website. The June 2023 API price hike ended that arrangement in a weekend, and the official app inherited an audience that had spent years not using it.
What’s left, three years later, is competent in the ways the old client was not. Cold launches are quick. Scrolling is smooth. The mod tools have caught up to what power users actually need. None of that papers over the rest: a feed engineered to surface promoted posts and AI-generated answers ahead of the human conversation that made the site worth visiting in the first place.
The app works. That is the entire problem. There is no longer a version of Reddit on your phone built by someone who reads Reddit — only the one built by the people who sell ads against it.
The app loads quickly, scrolls without jank, and inserts a promoted post roughly every five entries no matter what you do.
FEATURES
Home, Popular, and All are the three default feeds, with a fourth Answers tab that surfaces AI summaries pulled from comment threads. Communities live behind a sidebar drawer, and the search bar now defaults to a hybrid of posts, communities, and Reddit's own generated answers above the actual results.
Comments load lazily and collapse with a tap on the depth bar. Chat is in the bottom nav, video posts autoplay with sound muted, and the post composer supports images, polls, links, and Reddit's first-party video upload up to fifteen minutes. Notification controls are per-subreddit, per-thread, and per-keyword. Two-factor auth, passkeys, and Sign in with Apple are all wired in.
Reddit Premium runs $5.99 a month or $49.99 a year and removes banner and feed ads, grants a monthly coin allowance for awards, and unlocks app icon variants. Moderator tooling — removal reasons, mod queue, ban evasion filter — ships in the same binary as the consumer app and has been the main beneficiary of the last two years of native work.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The post-2023 rewrite is finally fast. Cold launch is under two seconds on a recent iPhone, scroll performance holds in long comment trees, and the media viewer no longer freezes when you swipe between images in a gallery. Compared to the 2022 version that drove people to Apollo in the first place, it is a different app.
Mod tools are the genuine win. The mobile mod queue, removal-reason picker, and rule-based automod review all work the way third-party power users had been asking for since 2018. If you run a community, you can now do most of the job from your phone without dropping to desktop.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The feed is the problem. Promoted posts appear roughly every five entries, the Answers tab pushes generated summaries above human comments on any thread it can scrape, and the default Home algorithm still resurfaces day-old posts from communities you already muted. Turning any of this off requires three to four settings screens and several of the switches do not persist between app updates.
The third-party loss still hangs over everything. Apollo's gesture vocabulary, Narwhal's compact density, and RIF's customisable swipe actions are gone and Reddit has not built a single feature that meaningfully replaces them. The in-app browser opens external links by default with no setting to route through Safari View Controller. NSFW content is invisible in the App Store build regardless of account settings — a 2024 policy change that quietly disabled a chunk of the site for iOS users.
CONCLUSION
Install it if you actually use Reddit, because there is no longer a credible alternative on iOS and the official app at least no longer crashes. Don't expect it to feel like a tool built for readers — the priorities are clearly elsewhere. Watch the Answers tab; if it gets more aggressive, the next exodus will not have anywhere to go.