Reddit has bought Alien Blue, a popular iPhone app that many iOS users use to browse the social news site on their mobile devices.
The app will get a new icon, and while Reddit focuses on merging the iPhone and iPad versions of the app into a single universal app, both versions are free.
The iPad app normally costs $4 while the iPhone app is free with a $2 “Pro” in-app purchase.
According to Ellen Pao, Reddit’s head of strategic partnerships, the company will keep the “Alien Blue” name and the app’s developer, Jase Morrissey, will be joining the Reddit team.
“Our whole philosophy has been to give our users choice. We’ve got the reddit AMA app, and alienblue coming out… but we really want users to use whatever they want.” says Ellen Pao, reddit’s head of Strategic Partnerships. “We think Alienblue 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.”
To celebrate and ease the move to reddit, everyone can get the Alien Blue Pro upgrade free for one week.
The iPad app will also be free until we integrate it with the iPhone app and the two become one universal app.
The “Pro” features in the iPhone version of the app will extend to the iPad when it is transformed into a universal app, so all Alien Blue users should download the new version immediately while the upgraded features are available at no cost.