Reddit Mac apps: what the App Store actually lists

Search the Mac App Store for Reddit and fourteen results come back. Read the developer line under each one and something becomes obvious: Reddit is not on that list. The results are Safari content blockers, menu bar widgets, and paid clients from small studios, some of which have not shipped an update in years. That is the actual state of Reddit on macOS, and it changes what the decision is about. The question is not which app to buy. The question is which window to put the site in.

Reddit publishes nothing for macOS

The evidence is in two places, and both are checkable in under a minute.

The first is a store search. Filtering the App Store catalog to Mac software and searching for Reddit returns results from Tony Sundharam, Asperisoft, Nutmeg Studios, AppYogi Software, and a handful of other independent developers. No listing on that page carries REDDIT, INC. as the seller. Compare that to searching for Slack, where the first result is published by SLACK TECHNOLOGIES L.L.C. When a company ships a Mac app, its name is right there.

The second is the compatibility block on Reddit's own mobile listing. The Reddit app from REDDIT, INC. states requirements for iPhone (iOS 16.0 or later), iPad (iPadOS 16.0 or later), and Apple Vision (visionOS 1.0 or later). There is no Mac line. That absence has a practical consequence. Apple Silicon Macs can run iPhone and iPad apps, but only when the developer leaves that option enabled. Reddit has not. So the workaround that quietly solves this problem for other services, installing the iPad build on a Mac, is closed here.

That leaves two real categories: something built by a third party, or the website in a window of its own.

What the third party shelf is actually made of

The results are not interchangeable. They fall into three groups that do very different jobs, and mixing them up is how money gets spent on the wrong thing.

Safari extensions that reshape reddit.com. Sink It for Reddit, Old Reddit from Asperisoft, and Reddirect are not applications. They install into Safari and change how the site behaves, redirecting to the old interface or filtering content. Nothing new appears in the Dock. If the goal is a separate window, these do not provide one.

Menu bar utilities. ReddBar sits in the menu bar and surfaces subreddits from there. Useful for glancing, not for reading a long comment thread.

Standalone clients. These are the ones that look like the answer. They talk to Reddit's API and render their own interface.

App	Developer	Price	Minimum macOS	Last updated
Readder Desktop for Reddit	Nutmeg Studios LLC	$14.99	macOS 10.15	March 2022
Readit, Reddit News Reader	AppYogi Software	$7.99	macOS 10.12	June 2025
Yesterday For Old Reddit	Ritinkar Pramanik	$2.99	macOS 16.5	August 2026
Oldr for Reddit	SecretKeys LLC	$0.99	macOS 10.14.6	August 2023
Protego for Reddit	Edgar Sanchez	$3.99	macOS 18.0	September 2026

The prices are small. The last updated column is the part worth reading twice.

Note also how far apart the minimum macOS numbers sit. Two of these run on releases from 2018 and 2019, while Protego for Reddit requires macOS 18.0 and will not appear as installable on anything older. A search result page does not surface that difference, so an app can look available, be bought, and then refuse to open. On an older Mac the requirement line is the first thing to check, ahead of features and ahead of reviews.

Why the update dates cluster the way they do

Third party Reddit clients did not thin out by accident. In 2023 Reddit changed the pricing of its data API, and the apps that depended on it went dark within weeks. The most visible one said so plainly on its own site, which is still up.

Apollo shut down on June 30, 2023 due to Reddit making drastic and sudden increases to API pricing for developers. Source: apolloapp.io

That single sentence explains the shape of the table above. A client written before that change either found a way to keep operating, or it stopped being maintained and stayed on sale anyway. The App Store does not remove a paid listing just because the developer moved on.

So the rule for anything on that shelf is simple. Look at the last updated date before looking at the price. An app touched within the last few months is being maintained by someone who survived the API change. An app whose last release predates June 2023 is a purchase with no support behind it, and no guarantee that the next time Reddit adjusts its API the app comes back.

The other consequence is subtler. Every third party client is a second place where a Reddit account is logged in, a second set of preferences, and a second thing to update. The site itself has none of those costs.

The site is already built to run as an app

This is the part most of the search results talk around. Reddit ships a web app manifest, which is the file a browser reads to decide whether a website can be installed as a standalone application. Reddit's declares the name Reddit, a start URL of the site root, a theme colour of #ff4500, and, most importantly, a display mode of standalone.

Standalone is the instruction that removes the browser interface. It means Reddit expects to be run in a window with no address bar and no tab strip, which is exactly what a separate app looks like. The site was prepared for this. Nothing needs to be reverse engineered.

That reframes the whole search. A Mac app for Reddit does not have to be written by anyone. It has to be created from the site, and macOS has three ways of doing that.

Three routes, and the one difference that decides it

Every route ends with an icon in the Dock. What separates them is what happens to the login and to everything already configured in a browser.

Route	How it starts	Carries existing sign in	Extensions available	Requires
Safari, Add to Dock	File menu, Add to Dock	No, sign in again	Safari extensions, toggled per app	macOS Sonoma 14 or later
Chrome or Edge, install page as app	Menu, then install page as app	Yes, uses the browser profile	Yes, the browser's extensions	The browser installed
Dedicated site to app tool	Pick the site, generate the app	Depends on the profile chosen	Yes, via the Chromium browser it builds on	The browser installed

Apple documents the Safari route clearly, and also documents its cost.

A web app functions independently of Safari. It shares no browsing history, cookies, website data, or settings with Safari. Source: support.apple.com

Read that as a feature or a problem depending on the situation. For a reader who wants Reddit sealed off from the rest of browsing, isolation is the point. For someone with an account already signed in, saved comment drafts, and a content blocker configured, starting from zero is a step backwards.

The Chromium routes go the other way. Chrome installs a site as an app from the More menu, under Cast, save, and share, then Install page as app, and manages the result at chrome://apps. Edge does the same from Settings and more, then More tools, then Apps. What lands in the user's Applications folder is a small launcher bound to that browser and that browser profile, so the session, the cookies, and the extensions all come with it.

Notifications, and what a Dock icon can actually tell you

One reason people go looking for a native client is the badge. A number on the Dock icon showing unread replies is the single feature that makes an app feel different from a tab, and it is worth knowing which routes deliver it.

Apple states that a web app added to the Dock can show a count of unread notifications on its icon, for sites that send notification alerts. Reddit does send web notifications, so the mechanism is available rather than theoretical. What it requires is that notification permission has been granted to the site inside that specific app, which is a separate grant from the one already given in a browser. This trips people up: notifications were working in the browser, the new app window looks identical, and nothing arrives. The permission simply has not been asked for yet in the new context.

The Chromium routes behave the same way, with one extra detail. Because the installed app runs on the browser profile it was created from, a site that already has notification permission in that profile usually keeps it. That is a small argument in favour of building the app from the browser where Reddit is already set up, rather than from a browser that has never loaded the site.

What no route delivers is a badge that updates while the app is closed. These are web applications. When the window is quit, the page stops running, and the count stops updating until it is opened again. A purchased native client can poll in the background, and for a reader whose only complaint is missing replies, that is the one honest reason to consider paying for one.

The case that actually settles the argument

Reddit is unusual among daily sites in one way: a large share of people using it hold more than one account. A main account and a throwaway, or a personal account and one tied to a project or a business.

In a browser, that means logging out and back in, or keeping one account in a private window that forgets everything on quit. Neither is comfortable to live with.

Separate app windows solve it structurally, because each app can be pinned to its own browser profile. Two icons in the Dock, two sessions, no switching. That is a capability neither the Safari route nor a single third party client offers cleanly, and it is the reason people who read Reddit heavily end up with a wrapper rather than a purchased client. A site to app tool that already knows the site's URL and icon turns that into a two minute job rather than a configuration exercise, and the setup guide covers the profile choice, which is the only decision that matters here.

What to change first

Skip the paid clients until the last updated date on the listing has been checked, because several on that shelf stopped moving in 2022 and 2023. Install reddit.com as its own app from whichever Chromium browser already holds the signed in session, since the site's manifest is built for standalone mode and the login carries across. If a second account is in play, give it its own profile and its own icon rather than logging in and out, which is the one thing Kagemusha is set up to do quickly.