It’s been a long time coming, but we’ve finally launched an official reddit mobile app, and we built it ourselves this time. We’re pleased to announce the reddit AMA app on iOS. Edit: and Android.

AMAs started when redditors came up with questions for people that we would ask and videotape answers to, and the first person to collect questions was Jessica Livingstone for an interview of Caterina Fake in April 2006. The first AMA we recorded ourselves was of Adam Savage. Then AMAs started taking off on /r/askreddit, expanded into /r/iama and can now be found in various communities all over reddit.[1]

AMAs get a lot of attention outside of reddit, and often you’ll see “Top 10 answers or moments to [insert name of celebrity or person]’s AMA.” While those recaps may be good for those who cannot follow AMAs as they happen live, there is so much more to AMAs that those brief excerpts cannot convey. One of the best parts of AMAs is experiencing the complete spectrum of questions and answers with full context.

With this app, we want to share more about what reddit is all about, so people can find and enjoy a wider variety of AMAs as they are happening.

Some of our favorite AMAs are by people who have had amazing experiences, likewinning Jeopardy, rescuing Raju the elephant and driving solo across North America in a Tesla or living in a rainforest without electricity, running water or internet for seven years. We’ve had people do AMAs from outer space (astronaut Chris Hadfield) and in exile from the Ecuadorian Embassy (Julian Assange).

Some of the most popular AMAs on reddit are by people who are doing everyday jobs and want to share their stories, like the flight attendant for a top airline, and the vacuum cleaner repair technician who even followed up. And we love curveballs like the guy who kicks people out of Alamo Drafthouse movie theaters for texting or talking.

Some of the most enlightening AMAs are by people who have had traumatic experiences. Where else can you anonymously ask questions to someone mauled by a bear or someone wrongly jailed for 18 years? Or hear firsthand from a twin who was part of Mengele’s experiments during the Holocaust or someone who was on a hijacked flight?

Sometimes your questions are better than the answers (sorry, Jose Canseco). Famous redditors like to ask questions, too, like Snoop challenging Madonna. Sometimes the answers are really unexpected, like the medical answers in a surprising NSFW AMA that challenged people’s conceptions.

And you also feel reddit’s community spirit in AMAs. When a teen with leukemia fell asleep at the start of his AMA, others answered questions for him. People show theirreddit gold love in AMAs; the AMA with the most gildings was Patrick J. Carney’s with 264 months of gold given. That’s even more than Bill Gates (170 gildings across two AMAs), though he has personally received the most gold from AMAs (65 in his first AMA, 13 in his second).

We have noticed that many redditors like a tl;dr version of AMAs, and we’ve taken that to heart in our new app. A few good examples of redditor-created AMA tl;drs can be seen in /u/biinaryy’s summary of President Obama’s AMA and /r/tabled, a subreddit of summaries. It even has a collection of answers to the most popular AMA question.

We appreciate all the guests who stop by to visit our community; some of our favorite celebrity AMAs include ones by Bill Murray, three-timer Gillian Anderson, Emmy Rossum, Monty Python, Uzo Aduba, four-timer Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Lil Jon. And we’ll never forget the late, great Robin Williams.

Did we mention that this (and more!) is all in a mobile app? There are lots of other apps out there, and we want to encourage developers to build their own apps. We’re making it easier to work with reddit and have built out our OAuth API; some developers are already using it successfully.

Ultimately we want people to have different ways to reddit. Ideally, when people learn about reddit, they should have an understanding of what it is, not just what others portray reddit to be. So we created this introductory app for people to enjoy some of the best of reddit. We beta-tested it and our Android app with our gold users and /r/IAMAmods, who gave really helpful feedback (and lots of love for the ability to find AMAs by categories–check it out).

We’re working hard to release the Android version that’s in beta as soon as possible. Edit: We are now available on Android.

In the iOS version, you’ll see that due to Apple guidelines, we hide NSFW content by default in the iPhone app, but don’t worry! If you log in and check “allow adult content” you can see all AMAs uncensored, including NSFW ones. We know we still have a lot of work to do, so please share your feedback, and we’ll keep trying.

We’re also interested in what your friends think. If you have friends or family that aren’t on reddit, please ask them to check out the app and share their feedback. We’re listening.

[1] For more background, here’s a good on AMAs.