The title says it all.
No, you don’t. Right after the OP, there is a “last reply”. Click on that and it takes you to the bottom of the thread.
An alternative is to click on the post count in the bottom right. That brings up a slider bar that you can slide to the very bottom. That option is available anywhere in the thread, not just in the OP.
You could also arbitrarily highlight any text in a post to get the Quote popup, tap it, and then delete the quoted text in the reply box. I’m not sure if the platform still associates the new post as a reply, though.
Not on my Android. Not on my Mac at home.
I just took a screenshot…which I’d share…if I could…to show that there is no " last reply " button.
You can see last reply in the box below the OP of this thread and I just tried clicking on it on my iPhone. It does in fact bring me directly to the last post.
OOOOOooooh.
Thanks!!
And oddly, now I can click Reply- but the quote bubble option is gone.
Wtf…
However, it then appears as a reply to the post (as it does here).
Turns out the three horizontal lines at upper right let us adjust Reply choices.
That–believe it or not–is a hamburger.
Huh. On my phone, the three horizontal lines (hamburger) don’t do it, but the reply arrow at the top of the reply window gives me Reply choices. Thanks!
I’m not sure if this works on a cellphone since I’m on my laptop, but on my laptop, under the slider bar to the right of the OP, there’s a return arrow [next to the bell] that allows a reply without going to the bottom of the thread.
how do you highlight text on an android phone.?
Place finger on text and leave it there until the blue highlight appears.
thanks!
It does not – however, if you kick off the editor by pressing the reply button at the bottom of a post, it will. So @needscoffee what you wrote isn’t correct.
Reply quotes are only considered replies if the reply text markup is in the post, e.g.
[quote="chappachula, post:16, topic:941911, full:true"]
That’s how a single post can be a reply to 10, 20, 100 different other posts. (Although this reminds me, I wanted to have some kind of warning around doing this to excess. It’s quite rare in the wild. Technically, you could edit in a quote reply so that an earlier post is a reply to a post in the future. 
)
I’ve highlighted, in purple, all the various ways to answer the question asked in the title of this post.
How do I enter a topic at the bottom?
Remember that Discourse tries very hard to enter the topic at the place you last stopped reading it. If you have never read a topic, then it lands you in the most logical spot: the beginning.
Discourse seems to tell your browser that every reply to a post that you pause at should be considered a separate page. This makes going into your browser’s History a chore, because if you click on a post and read 40 responses, you history will show 40 links, all with the original post’s title, not differentiated as to which reply is linked to. (I’m using Safari on an iPhone right now, but this also happens on my Mac with Chrome - don’t recall the board’s old hoster whose name slipped out of my memory doing this.)
If you use History to look for old sites you visited, it’s a (minor) annoyance. (I just did a test, opening a thread with 200+ replies and scrolling, scrolling, scrolling to the last one. History in that case only showed the ones where the scrolling paused, even if only for a fraction of a second.)
Yes, unfortunately this is an unavoidable side effect of keeping track of exact read location, history will be rather polluted. Apologies.