Hey everyone, bmeckel here! We know that a lot of users are extremely unhappy with the way that sponsored posts were implemented and bug fixes failed to work as promised. The whole team gets that, and more than anything we'd like to apologize. That being said, the amount of downvoting and derailing of threads that has started to occur in this subreddit have begun to make it toxic to the users who may not feel the same way. At the same time, however, we certainly don't want to have the users who do feel so strongly about the effects that ads/being owned by reddit/etc have had on the app feel that in any way we're trying to ignore them.

So, we're creating this thread to allow users to discuss whatever you'd like in terms of what I had mentioned above. Again, we want to be clear that we're not silencing anyone here, we're allowing the subreddit to continue to be the helpful, informative place it usually is, while still taking into consideration that some users are far from happy at the moment. Reddit staff, as well as moderators such as myself (we're not reddit staff, we just help where we can) will be on hand to answer any questions to the best of our abilities if you have any.

In addition, I'd like to address some of those users who seem to think we're bad at communicating/we're abandoning the app. We are most certainly not doing any such thing. The fact of the matter is that we missed some pretty serious bugs, no one is going to deny that. However, the team is hard at work trying to get them fixed, because believe me, no one wants them fixed more than us. I'm sorry if you feel like we haven't been communicating, but the fact is that nearly everyone involved has been on this subreddit answering questions for the past couple of months, and us moderators have been doing it for years at this point. I hope that you can see that we all feel strongly about this app, and that we want the same thing, the best AlienBlue possible.

Love, bmeckel and the AlienBlue team

because BIG RED TEXT that says NSFW is in and of itself not safe for work. (especially when there's a lot of it...)

The circlejerk is really driving me nuts.

I really love this app! It's a little buggy at times but that's being worked out and I can usually fix it. Thank you devs.

Please make alien blue register what I have clicked on between devices. I am logged into my account on then all yet when I browse on one device it has no knowledge of what I have seen on other devices. Ik its spoiled first world bitching but I also am a software engineer and know how easily this could be addressed. Come on guys help a brother out would ya.

Been a huge fan of AB forever. Decided I would try out a new app - Narwhal.

Decided "new app, new account" deleted my old 7 year old account to start anew.

Oh bugger that is where my gold was.

Only relevant as I got it for the AB discontinuation.

Oh well.

BTW Narwhal is pretty good, purchased it to get rid of ads, clones AB pretty well.

Will still come back to AB from time to time

This posts main purpose is to address the cries of foul that have been propagating through the community for a while now, mostly related to sponsored posts and slowness of updates.

1. Acquisitions owe you nothing: do you know what normally happens when a large company like Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. purchase a company? They poach the developers and then shut down the business. It happens all the time. I, for one, am glad that this app still receives updates at all. If Alien Blue had been purchased by Google instead of Reddit, you'd probably be complaining about broken sharing features until the end of time.

2. Businesses are not the same as independent developers: Jase started Alien Blue as a side project in his free time. He had a regular programming job, which is why Alien Blue, a side project, didn't need to generate income. Is it nice when side projects make money? Sure. But sometimes people like Jase care more about delivering a great product than they do about making money, so even the free version of AB didn't have ads. However, unlike individuals, businesses exist to make money. In order to continue the development of AB, Reddit needs to pay developers. In order to pay developers, they need to have money. You get money with things like ads and sponsored posts. Guess what? The money you paid to Jase when he was still the developer didn't go to Reddit, it went to Jase. Your arguments about "paying for the app so I shouldn't see sponsored posts" is only applicable if the entity you paid is the same entity that is providing the updates, which is no longer the case. This dovetails nicely with point 1.

3. Probably the most harmful thing about this whole debacle is that actually relevant concerns (i.e. bugs) are being drowned out by the cries of outrage related to ads / sponsored posts. For instance, this post/announcement is about a bug-fix update. Yet half the comments in the thread are still complaining about things that are not bugs.

Basically, it comes down to this: management has changed, and they are going to make different decisions from the ones that Jase made. If you don't like it, there are plenty of alternatives, like BaconReader or the upcoming /r/apolloapp. Go to those. But please leave Alien Blue for people who actually can and want to contribute in a positive way, instead of perpetually being negative and complaining.

Much love to the community,

Strallus, a subsidiary of Corporate Shills International.

haven't found a way to do any of the following:

Navigate quickly to a specific subreddit by searching (have to scroll down to the bottom of a the sidebar...?)

Navigate to a subreddit from the front page (on android you can go straight to the sub a post is from, one of my favorite features)

subscribe to a subreddit: why is this so hard?? took me 5 minutes to understand. On android there's a little plus button next to the sub in the sidebar.

WHY is there a button for hidden posts?? there's a reason I fucking hid them in the first place!

So we all know Alien Blue will finally die with iOS 11 since it is a 32 bit app and no one will ever recompile it. But when using AB and logged in to a well used account there is no record anywhere as to what you've looked at. So you can click on links and read posts and the instant you back out to the top level, the entire browsing history cannot be retrieved even if someone had your phone, and even if you are logged in to your account, no one can see what your views were even if they logged into your reddit account on a computer. And the internal browser is completely sandboxed. So it's secure.

What 64 bit app is equally as secure?? I want to be able to log in to my reddit account on my phone but then have total security that no one else who might be logged into my reddit account can make out what I'm reading. I'm afraid the other apps would "purple out" viewed content on the other device, or have viewed content show up on "recently viewed" on the other device.

Thanks.

Ever since the update, alien blue freezes about once every 3 minutes. And this is on an iPad. A fairly new one. New enough that this shouldn't be happening. Nothing ever freezes on my iPad but alien blue. It's also the only thing to ever freeze in the history of my iPad.

Get to work guys. This is looooong overdue. It's way too late in the game to be still fixing day-one type issues. For that reason, I'm deleting alien blue. even though I have the paid version!

Back to Safari, frustrating. But at least it works

On some level The_Donald is basically a karma scam, where everyone upvotes eachother's posts no matter what.

/r/CircleJerk lost popularity just as The_Donald blew up.

Certainly a portion, probably the majority, of people on there are genuine Trump supporters. But those posts are drowned out by the dank memes and self-described shit posts of the circle jerkers.

So many of their top posts are basically just vandalism "Hurr durr lets fuck of the front page and piss people off hurr durr"

Anyway, it's gotten old, and I'd just rather not see them anymore.

Please reply so I know my notifications are working in alien blue

Hello everyone! Thank you for your patience and understanding over the last several months. I know you’ve all been waiting for an update, and I am thrilled to announce that we just pushed the Alien Blue update. It will be available for everyone within 24 hours.

We listened to your requests and concerns, and went through thousands of emails to make sure we caught every known bug in Alien Blue. We want to thank all of you for taking the time to report these bugs, which will make this Alien Blue update super solid.

Below are the list of improvements and fixes. Feel free to email me at [email protected] with any questions or concerns regarding the new update.

Release Notes : Alien Blue 2.9.2 (iPhone)

Improvements:

• Added support for voting in Inbox using 2-finger tap gesture

• Added support for appending device family to bug reports

• Added support for touch-previewing GIFv links

• Added latest default subreddits for unauthenticated users

• Imgur gifs will default to GIFv for instant playback

• Improved "removed image" response handling from imgur

• Reduced latency when loading animated gifs

Fixes:

• Fixed: Several GIFv related issues

• Fixed: Status bar occasionally overlapping navigation bar

• Fixed: Fixed status bar overlapping when tapping an image twice in browser

• Fixed: Fixed non-compact navbar in browser when device is landscape

• Fixed: Title on comments screen changing width after comments have loaded

• Fixed: Potential crash while loading comment threads

• Fixed: Background notification issues on iOS 8

• Fixed: Low-contrast mode not scaling when rotating device

• Fixed: Portrait mode occasionally appears when device is in landscape

• Fixed: Captcha clipping when creating posts and sending PMs

Edit:

• Removed mention of changing the icon

• There are now analytics which help us understand how people use the app, which will help us improve features that people use a lot and fix ones that they don't

• Per our privacy policy, we use google analytics and we just look at aggregate data. (nothing personal is shared)

• You can turn off sponsored posts if you have a gold subscription (must be bought on the site)

• Pro gives you more features, but is not equal to gold, which is a subscription

• Sponsored posts are going to be more diverse, we're just starting to test how people react to them

Update: [Jase] (https://www.reddit.com/r/AlienBlue/comments/2u8y74/re_sponsored_posts/) responds regarding sponsored posts.

Update: Pro users should not be seeing sponsored posts. Please PM me if you are a pro user who still sees sponsored posts.

Ok, one feature that I would absolutely LOVE would be the ability to group certain subreddits of my choice into categories. For instance, I can have a music/music production list including r/wearethemusicmakers, r/edmproduction, r/ipadmusic, r/electronicmusic, r/thisisourmusic and a group of funny/time wasting subreddits including r/funny, r/pics, r/adviceanimals, etc.

This would be a HUGE addition to your already excellent app. Thank you!

I like to cruise top>hour..the whole feed is polluted with this sub...I know I'm missing good content because of this upvote brigading Please do something.

Can you add a nsfw filter to alien blue. Bonus points for pass code lock. I'm on /r/nofap and it is a little difficult to block nsfw subreddits with just keywords

I had purchased Alien Blue premium years ago, (twice) and had missed the promotion for the 4 years of Reddit gold when the new official app was released. I didn't have an iPhone at the time like I do now. Is there any possibility I could redeem that now that I do have an iPhone and alien blue again?