[robwilliams]

Well it was the official app before this one. Considering how good AB is I think there's some technical reason to redo the app. Who knows.

[kennywinker]

My guess: AlienBlue was developed with power users in mind and this new app was developed with showing people ads in mind.

A major re-design gives them the excuse to remove and never re-add many features and tune the app for a different type of user and a different type of interaction.

[robwilliams]

Inserting ads into the Alien Blue feed would have been easy. You may be right about the different target user, though.

[joshschreuder]

AB was developed by one person (who is still on the app team) - it's possible AB isn't suited to having a team work on it, or they want to follow new best practices (eg. Swift)