Reddit, one of the most famous social bookmarking sites, has released its app for both iOS and Android and with this it has replaced Alien Blue service as sites official mobile client. These Reddit apps were in beta version for last couple of month.
“We learned a lot from our passionate Alien Blue community about what makes a great iOS app and we applied those learnings when building Reddit for iOS,” Alex Le, Reddit’s vice president of consumer product.
“Due to limited resources, we decided to focus our efforts on making Reddit for iOS our primary and official Reddit client. The new code base has allowed us to add features and build a stable client in a record amount of time. We hope to keep up the pace and deliver new updates at least once a month (hopefully even more often than that).”
The new app is quite great and it’s a right step to create a high quality mobile experience to its users. It’s surprising that most of other social bookmarking sites had gone the mobile app way much earlier.
Reddit’s mobile strategy has rather remained inconsistent. It launched AMA app two years ago and later it was abandoned. However, the Alien Blue has been quite successful and it gave the reason for Reddit to think seriously about its app.
Last year, its cofounder Steve Huffman returned and then CEO Ellen Pao had to resign. It hired the Instagram engineer Chen Chen as its main iOS engineer.
“We felt an obligation to deliver a Reddit experience to our core users — the people who love Reddit and can’t live without it,” Le says.
It’s more like a souped up version of Alien Blue. It retains the Alien Blue’s Night Mode feature and viewing reddit in the low light situations. There is a new speed read feature that helps users navigate the lengthy threads.
The performance of the new app is also noteworthy. It downloads in only 5 seconds which is a feat.Chen and his team paid every attention to detail to retain its agility. Reddit hopes that it will give people the reason to use the site.
So the conservative Reedit has ultimately modernized.
Surely, many Redditors will flock to the new site , but it will not compel other Redditors to use their site of choice. They will certainly not stop using their old app. Therefore it has to be seen the response of the new app.
