Reddit app for iOS and Android gets biggest update in years

The Reddit mobile app doesn’t often get big updates, but this week was an exception, with the company adding a new Discover tab and a menu for managing subscriptions.

In a blog post announcing the feature, Reddit reports that one in five users have joined at least one new community after using the Discover tab. Jason Costa, director of content and communities at Reddit, made the following statement on his blog:

We’re ushering in a new era of discovery on Reddit, with images and videos at the forefront. We’re making discovery of relevant content and communities more intuitive with the Discover tab. It’s a great new way for people to explore and interact with hundreds of thousands of communities around the world.

The Discovery tab is now at the top navigation level of the app, replacing the Communities & Subscriptions tab. Clicking on it will take you to a scrollable list of Reddit content from many subreddits you may not have followed yet.

Reddit says the Discover tab populates content based on both the subreddits you’re already following and how much time you spend on them. So if you spend a lot of time in r/OLED, the tab will most likely show content from other home theaters or tech subreddits. On the other hand, if you’re an r/Xbox subscriber but rarely visit, you may occasionally see content from, say, a Halo subreddit, but not as often as on a topic you use frequently.

You can also drill down into categories like “tech”or “sports”. And you can provide feedback on individual pieces of content with options like “show me more of this content”, “show me less of this content”, or “hide this content”, which will affect what will be displayed on the tab in the future.

There are a number of other changes as well. For example, many of the features in the Communities & Subscriptions tab can now be found by swiping from left to right. From there, you’ll have the ability to access the moderated subreddit features, sort and customize your communities, rate the list of Redditors you follow, and of course navigate to the r/all entry point.

Of course, all this is in the official Reddit app for iOS and Android. There are several third-party Reddit clients, but Costa told The Verge that “there are currently no plans to expose the API.”The Discover tab will also not be available on the web version of Reddit in the near future.

New Tab is in the process of being rolled out to Android and iOS Reddit users, although not everyone will see the pop-up update at the same time.