It's incredibly important for so many reasons. Just as a reminder, users have been shifting from desktop to mobile so the world is now mobile-first. Facebook ha

It's incredibly important for so many reasons. Just as a reminder, users have been shifting from desktop to mobile so the world is now mobile-first. Facebook had a bet-the-company shift in the early 2010s from desktop to mobile and the Instagram app is a huge part of why Meta is valuable today. Reddit makes money through ads. Charging for API access and expecting third-party app developers to build an entire ad platform is not possible. The tech is incredibly difficult to build and then you have to actually get advertisers to use the platform (btw - this is something that Reddit is still failing at versus Facebook/Google/Twitter). Something like 50% of Reddit's traffic is from mobile users. If Reddit wants to add new features for these users, it's impossible to do so if all the users are using third-party apps. Bunch of other reasons that I can enumerate in a bit.