Reddit announces acquisition of third-party iOS client Alien Blue, it will be now be its official app.
Reddit, the popular community news sharing site, announced the acquisition of a third-party Reddit iOS client, Alien Blue, on Wednesday as it expands its mobile presence. In an official blog post on the company's site, Reddit said Alien Blue is now the official app for the news site. As a part of the deal, the app's lead developer, Australia-based Jase Morrissey, will join Reddit's engineering team to further improve the app.
The financial details of the deal were not disclosed by either company but the acquisition comes a few weeks after Reddit secured $50 million in the latest round of funding led by Sam Altman, with Sequoia Capital's Alfred Lin, and Marc Andreesen, ZDNet reported. The company is clearly putting its capital funding to good use by deeply integrating into the mobile space, which is the future of technology.
"We are pleased to announce that the most popular iOS client for Reddit, Alien Blue, is now an official Reddit app," the company said in a blog post. "We're also happy to say that its lead developer, Jase Morrissey, has joined us as our first Aussie. We have been working closely with Jase for the past several years, and are thrilled to officially welcome him to our team."
Alien Blue will sit alongside the Official Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) app in App Store. To communicate the message more clearly, Reddit has made the Alien Blue Pro upgrade free for a week, along with its iPad counterpart.
The official Alien Blue app by Reddit allows users to browse various categories on the social network, view images, upvote, submit new content and also receive notifications. The Pro version of the app allows seamless switching between multiple accounts, easy search for subreddits by topics or interests and exclude posts with keywords.
Alien Blue's Morrissey has shared his excitement in joining the Reddit team in a separate post on Reddit.
"As a developer by trade, you can imagine how excited I am to have reddit's mobile UI/UX design talent and front-end engineers working alongside me," he wrote. "This is the crew that brought home numerous accolades for their work on the AMA application, and I'm stoked that I get to work with them on AB."
