Leave a Review Narwhal 2 for Reddit
Videos ignore mute button!!
I came to this app because Antenna was getting too out of date. I wish the gesture handling were more like Antenna’s but I recognize that that is a design decision that is mostly over. Here are my major griefs with this app: 1) Videos don’t say they’re videos (they look the same as photos) and they don’t respect my phone’s silence button. So I can’t use this app at night next to my spouse. 2) The image and album handling is poor. I struggle to exit from having zoomed on an image. I thought zoomed all the way out and so can now swipe to get away from the image. Nope. I have to try two more times. 3) Albums are frustrating. There’s no way to swipe between images. I have to completely exit the image back to gallery view to view the next one.Show lessmasterpants422
Audio issues cause hearing damage
At random, anything with sound will be played at mac volume, irrespective of the phone’s volume at the time. Wasn’t too annoyed with it, cause the app volume resynced with the device volume after pressing the volume button once. But then it happened while wearing headphones. Incredible pain. People have been posting about the issue in the support subreddit for a while now, and still no fix. This is actively dangerous and injurious.
The app is mostly nicely featured and user friendly, but good design is irrelevant when the app causes one of the only kinds of injuries you can never heal from. I’d suggest apollo.Show lesspineapplehug
First complaint after years of use.
I’ve been using Narwhal as my Reddit client for nearly five years and for the most part it’s performed wonderfully. However, in recent weeks I’ve noticed ads opening links to the App Store (iOS, obvs) from within a comment thread. I’m not clicking on ads, the store is just opening up undbidden while I’m trying to read or make a comment.
I’m not 100% that this is an issue with Narwhal or with Reddit itself, but it’s gotten annoying enough now that I felt compelled to write this.Show lessrandomash
Used to be great. Ads are terrible now.
This used to be my go-to Reddit app. I loved the functionality and ease of use. But in the past few weeks, the ads are unbearable. They open up automatically half the time, even when you don’t touch them. And then it’s stuck in a loop of you trying to go back to the app and exit out of the post quick enough so the ad doesn’t re-click itself, and eventually you just have to close the app and hope you can go another twenty minutes without hitting one of those ads.Show lessLord Bigglesbee
Used to be my favorite
I've been using this app heavily for a few years now. Lately, the app has been plagued by bugs which are making me consider alternatives. The most common issue I have is unresponsiveness, or freezing entirely, primarily when playing videos. I find myself having to force close the app and reboot it several times a day, always related to watching videos. This makes for a currently awful UX as your place in Reddit is lost and you need to locate to your previous location which is sometimes near impossible.
Please fix these issues as this is by far my favorite Reddit app and I would hate to relearn the muscle memory.Show lessdnsjfbf
Two complaints
1. No list of friends on the sidebar. You get r/friends, but no actual list.
2. There is a bug that will stop background media playback when going to the app. This is because you played some video in the app in the past, but it was not closed properly. You can fix it by closing the app and reopening. This is a well documented bug for several years on the getnarwhal subreddit with no fix.Show lessJerber12
Clean and fast
I’ve compared narwhal to the official Reddit app a few times and narwhals strength is it’s simplicity and layout in its interface that makes browsing thru Reddit very fast and efficient. The official Reddit app is so busy and poorly laid out. With narwhal I can scan more posts in a shorter amount of time. Plus narwhal has single tap comment collapse and automatically marks posts as read and has the “mark all above as read” feature and even a “hide all above” to organize posts better so you don’t keep re-reading the same post titles. If you go through tons of posts per day on Reddit, narwhal is the better choice. It has better control over font settings too. I hope the creators never mess up narwhal and try to be more like the official Reddit app with more flashy icons that are just not necessary.Show lessorbitalpunk
Decent App, but Not for Me
After two weeks of use, here are my impressions off the app:
It’s a good alternative to Reddit’s native app.
+ You can search directly for a user or subreddit,
+ you can upvote/downvote posts/comments with swipes (as well as reply, save, and more),
+ and many other functions more than the Reddit app.
+ It even has a neat little tutorial for basic use at the top of the screen!
However, I have several issues with the app:
- Following a user seems vague (the “+Friend” is unclear to me),
- You can upvote/download posts & comments older than 6 months (which Reddit doesn’t allow), making me doubt if my votes are actually registering in the site.
• I know I can probably verify by accessing the post/comment from a browser, etc., but I don’t really wanna do that.
- The auto-preview is all-or-nothing, which will show photos & videos and direct you to websites upon clicking the post, or leave the post blank when clicking it. I haven’t figured out how to use it to my liking, so maybe it’s just a setting I missed or uninstalling-then-reinstalling the app.
- Clicking the source link (e.g. photos/videos from Imgur) does not take you to it. My fingers might be too fat to choose it, or I’m doing it wrong. 🤷♂️
These aren’t objectively negative issues, just my opinion on what doesn’t work for me. It offers a different user-experience than other Reddit clients, which others will enjoy more than me. Keep up the good work folks!Show lessJoelitoHH
I like the app for mobile.
As mentioned above I like the app for mobile. But I would like it to make posting personal photos and videos more easier. It’s not like desktop where all of that is available on the same screen. Each subreddit has different rules and accessing the side bar is difficult on this mobile app. It can be done but with great difficulty. I really only use mobile to view Reddit. Because I like to keep my laptop for business.Show lessMickJamesD
Ads play in the background after backing out of link
Just starting today, I clicked a news link and suddenly a 30 minute video played that didn’t seem to be linked to the news website. I backed out to the main page thinking it would stop. Nope it kept playing. I swiped down on my iPhone to pause the audio and after a few seconds it finally went away. A few minutes later it started playing again randomly. Paused it again and it went away. It just started doing this as of May 6 and if it keeps happening I am deleting this app even though I think it’s the best of the third party appsShow lessJMG617
