Alien Blue

» see alienblue.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

alien blue was the iphone app reddit users actually used for years before reddit had its own iphone app. one developer, jase morrissey, building it from melbourne in objective-c. the icon was a blue cartoon alien. the app worked. for a long stretch it was the only client most ios redditors recommended, sitting next to the awful mobile web view that reddit shipped from its own domain.

reddit bought it in october 2014 for an undisclosed amount and hired morrissey. for about a year and a half it ran as the unofficial-official ios client, with the blue alien still on the icon and morrissey still mostly the person shipping updates. then in april 2016 reddit launched a new ground-up rewrite under its own brand. alien blue was pulled from the app store on april 7, the same day the new app went live.

this one i missed by stack. android was my phone in the years alien blue mattered, and reddit on android in that era meant reddit sync or relay for reddit, not alien blue. so i read about the acquisition in techcrunch in 2014 the way i read about ios app news in general, with a flat noted-but-not-personal feeling. when the shutdown happened i found out from an hn thread weeks later.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

reddit in 2010-2014 was peculiar about mobile. the site itself ran on a stack that did not lend itself to a clean mobile view, and the official reddit team was not building one with any urgency. that created a market. on android you had three or four well-loved third-party clients including reddit is fun and baconreader. on ios that market was mostly alien blue.

morrissey kept the app updated through ios redesigns and the slow accumulation of reddit features over time (gilding, then native image previews, then a thousand smaller comment-threading tweaks). pro users paid a few dollars and unlocked extra features. the app had a paid base and a single-developer cadence that meant fixes shipped in days instead of quarters.

~ the day it died ~

the april 2016 rewrite was reddit's first real attempt to own its mobile experience. the new app was not built on top of alien blue. it was a fresh codebase with reddit's own branding and a different visual language entirely. alien blue was removed from sale the same day. existing users could keep using their installed copy for a while, but the app would not get updates and would eventually stop authenticating against reddit's api.

as compensation, alien blue pro users got four years of free reddit gold. that was a generous gesture by 2016 acqui-hire standards, and it is the part of the shutdown people still mention when they bring it up.

~ the long tail ~

the broader story alien blue belongs to is the api shutoff of june 2023. that is when reddit raised the price of api access to a level that killed apollo, reddit is fun, sync, and baconreader in roughly the same week. alien blue had already been gone for seven years by then, so it was not part of the cull. but the cull was the second act of the same logic: reddit wants to own its mobile clients, and any third-party app that gets too big to ignore becomes either an acquisition target or a shutdown target.

morrissey himself moved on. the blue alien icon, which had been one of those weird affectionate visual memories for a generation of redditors, exists now mostly in screenshots and old appstore archives.

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