Screenshot: Khamosh Pathak
After Reddit purged its free API for third-party apps, the landscape of Reddit apps became quite bleak. You now have two options: You either use Reddit’s own app, which is not great and is chock-full of recommended posts and videos you don’t want to see; or you use the Reddit website, and jump through popups forcing you to open the Reddit app instead.
While Reddit has made sure to leave you virtually no third-party app alternative on the App Store—leading some to switch to other platforms—thankfully, there is something that you can do about the mobile Reddit experience on Safari, thanks to the browser’s support for extensions.
Sink It for Reddit is a Safari extension created specifically to make Reddit on the iPhone usable again, and it’s surprising how much impact a simple clean up can have on the website. At first glance, the interface still looks the same, but there are clear improvements.
First of all: All the promoted posts, recommended posts, and ads are gone. These absences bring back the feed-like interface Apollo users love so much. Second, all the popups, and buttons for installing the Reddit app are gone as well. Frankly, just these two changes make Reddit infinitely better to use on the iPhone.
There are also some quality of life improvements. You can double-tap to upvote comments; there’s a button to scroll down through comments, and a button to quickly jump to the top; and nested comments are color coded here. (So at least one thing from third-party apps made a comeback.)
Sink It for Reddit is effortless to use. Once the Safari extension is enabled, there’s not much left for you to do. You can go to the app’s settings to disable features that you don’t want.
To set it up, go to Settings > Safari > Extensions > Sink It for Reddit and enable the extension. Then, open the Reddit website in Safari browser. Tap the “Aa” button in the toolbar, and choose the “Sink It for Reddit” extension once. It will ask you for permission to access the Reddit website. Once that’s done, reload the site and say hello to the new experience. You don’t need to do anything else now. The Reddit experience will stay clean going forward.
