What happened
On April 7, 2016, Reddit released brand-new official applications for iOS and Android, rebuilt from the ground up, and simultaneously ended development of Alien Blue, the iOS client it had acquired in 2014. The company explained that Alien Blue's aging codebase made incremental improvement impractical and that its engineering team had concluded it was better to rebuild the mobile experience entirely to make it faster, more modern, and more usable.
Alien Blue remained usable for people who had already downloaded it but was pulled from the App Store for new users, effectively marking its end. The launch represented Reddit's first truly native, cross-platform official mobile presence and reflected a strategic bet that its growth would increasingly come from smartphones rather than the desktop site. By owning and controlling its own apps, Reddit gained the ability to shape the mobile experience, surface advertising, and steer users away from third-party clients, a direction that would deepen over the following years and shape future conflicts with independent app developers.