How do Reddit's mobile apps differ from the desktop web experience?

Reddit's official mobile app and its desktop web experience differ primarily in interface layout, feature accessibility, and the context in which they are typically used. The desktop web experience offers the largest canvas for content consumption: post text, images, and comment threads are displayed with more screen real estate, making it easier to read long comment chains, see sidebar information like subreddit rules and resources, and use keyboard shortcuts that experienced users rely on heavily. The desktop experience also provides the most complete access to moderation tools, which are more numerous and easier to navigate on a browser with extensions available. The official mobile app, which is available for iOS and Android, is optimized for casual, scrolling consumption and one-handed navigation. It surfaced a more visually prominent card-based layout that emphasizes images and videos, which can make text-heavy communities feel somewhat less readable than they do on desktop. The app provides push notifications for replies, messages, and mentions, which the desktop experience does not replicate natively. Some community features — particularly certain types of polls, live event threads, and interactive posts — are rendered better on the mobile app. However, the app has historically been criticized for being slower and buggier than well-maintained third-party clients that existed prior to 2023, and for having a more aggressive onboarding flow that steers users toward community recommendations rather than letting them navigate freely. The mobile web experience (visiting reddit.com in a phone browser rather than the app) has generally been considered inferior to both the app and the desktop by experienced users, because Reddit's mobile web interface is designed primarily to encourage app downloads. Users who prefer the older Reddit interface can access old.reddit.com on desktop, which retains the classic three-column layout.