It's described as the same Alien Blue users know and love, but the third-party gateway into the annals of Reddit is now officially a part of the threaded news site.
Alien Blue has been the most popular iOS app for accessing the forum site, making it a logical app to serve as the site's official app. The terms of the deal remain undisclosed, as well as any plans to bring the official Reddit app to the Android nation at some point.
"Our whole philosophy has been to give our users choice. We've got the Reddit AMA app, and Alien Blue coming out ... but we really want users to use whatever they want," says Ellen Pao, Reddit's head of strategic partnerships. "We think Alien Blue is great, and it's the most popular Reddit app on iOS. We wanted to be able to offer it as a Reddit app, and we wanted to help Jase with additional resources to do everything he wanted to do with it."
The transition into the the hands of Reddit isn't without hiccups. Users of Alien Blue will have to migrate to the Reddit-owned version of the app, though the software remains the same. App developer Jason Morrissey is making the migration to Reddit as well.
Users of Alien Blue Pro will have to purchase the premium edition of the app, unless they act quickly and take advantage of the week-long migration deal Reddit is offering. Yes, any iOS user can pickup Alien Blue Pro for free until the one-week window shuts.
Users of previous editions of Alien Blue may want to consider exporting their settings so that they can load them in to the new app.
The acquisition of Alien Blue is one of many recent indicators attesting to the health of the forum site. Earlier this month, Reddit raised $50 million in funding and distributed it across its community in the form of shares of cryptocurrency.
"We're planning to use this money to hire more staff for product development, expand our community management team, build out better moderation and community tools, work more closely with third-party developers to expand our mobile offerings (try our new AMA app), improve our self-serve ad product, build out Redditgifts marketplace, pay for our growing technical infrastructure, and all the many other things it takes to support a huge and growing global Internet community," said Reddit CEO Yishan Wong.
