I don't use Reddit anymore, but I wanted to search something that I couldn't find anywhere. This is what I saw. After killing all the other apps, Reddit now is trying to force us to use their own spyware app.
Don't think of it as them being unprofessional, think of it as them having a safety valve to relieve the pressure of some people wanting to leave Reddit for Lemmy or elsewhere, because of their bs.
Someday, when they're confident enough that they have customer retention locked in, that methodology of bypassing will be removed.
I have 0 doubt that they eventually shut old.reddit down, or they make it so unusable that it doesn't make a difference anymore if they did. Probably with some extensive regretful apology letter about how hard it became for the team to maintain, something about the future of Reddit moving forward and blah blah blah...
the thing is, the one and only purpose of this dialog is to increase metrics of engagement, like how many users download the app. they don't need to convert every mobile web user to an app user immediately. as long as that dialog is driving the engagement metrics apps, it is doing its work correctly. obviously at some point there will stop increasing engagement, so the middle managers will turn and try to squeeze a bit more by removing the loopholes, but it is not an urgent problem. it even might be intentional so they can squeeze a bit more later
the one that i am surprised at how bad it is is Twitter, that is still hosted at twitter.com . even going to x.com just redirects to twitter.com . i assume that there's some major engineering problem that is preventing them from switching, but still, it has been almost 10 months and the clown at chief really pushed for the rebranding