[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.