Reddit Buys Its Way Into Mobile: The Alien Blue Acquisition and the Official-App Pivot (2014)

By 2014, Reddit faced an awkward reality: the most popular way to browse Reddit on an iPhone was an app the company had nothing to do with. Alien Blue, released on May 29, 2010 by Melbourne-based solo developer Jason 'Jase' Morrissey, had rapidly overshadowed Reddit's own early mobile efforts and become the dominant iOS client, praised as the 'undisputed champ' of Reddit apps. Some original Reddit employees reportedly used it in preference to building anything in-house.

On October 15, 2014, Reddit announced it had acquired Alien Blue for an undisclosed sum and hired Morrissey to keep working on it. Reddit relaunched the app under its own App Store account as its first official mobile client, pulling the previous listing and requiring users to re-download. As part of the transition, the iPad version—previously $3.99—became free, and the iPhone app's $1.99 'Pro' upgrade (multi-account support, night mode, keyword blocking, expanded image viewing) was unlocked free for one week.

Reddit framed the deal around user choice rather than control. Ellen Pao, then Reddit's Head of Strategic Partnerships, said the company's whole philosophy had been to give users choice, calling Alien Blue the most popular Reddit app on iOS and one it wanted to offer as a Reddit app. Notably, Reddit initially kept the Alien Blue name instead of rebranding it, and simultaneously indicated it was hiring to bring the client to other platforms, including Android.

The acquisition marked a strategic pivot: rather than compete with its own ecosystem, Reddit absorbed the best of it—buying credibility and a proven codebase overnight. It was the clearest signal yet that Reddit intended to own its mobile future rather than leave it to independent developers.

The official-app experiment via Alien Blue proved short-lived. Reddit discontinued the app in April 2016, citing an aging codebase, and replaced it with a wholly rewritten in-house Reddit app for iOS and Android—an abandonment that itself seeded the next wave of third-party clients like Apollo, and set the stage for the 2023 API-pricing rupture years later.