The fact that the app is still so bad after so much time has gone by indicates that it is the desired product that the company wants to offer. And after realizing that they were still losing users to better competitors, their solution was to destroy the ability to compete in the first place rather than improve the product.

They like the app as-is, with all of the terrible performance and UX that goes along with it. The reason behind that is because they're getting user engagement metrics and other telemetry data, more control over ad delivery and the content users see (including astroturfed sponsored Reddit content), and more monetization.

Third party apps, like Apollo and AlienBlue before it, cared about providing a good user experience. It just happens that users typically prefer experiences that aren't trying to capitalize their every interaction, and companies take that personally.

Alien Blue wasn’t rebranded. They bought it, called it the official app (with the name Alien Blue) for a little while, then launched their own app and stopped supporting AB.

Yeah I paid for alien blue pro or whatever it was called. Then they killed the app and gave me a year of Reddit premium (my memory is shit, idk the proper name). After a month or so I switched to Apollo, Reddit’s app was just so shit. I left when Apollo died and now only use dystopia (an app designed for blind users) for the infrequent times I visit Reddit. No adds. It’s almost read only. But it’s ideal for visiting niche subs that aren’t on lemmy without giving Reddit clicks/seeing ads.

You can also see this with the old website being much better than the new one and apparently there's an even newer one that people who like the old new one generally hate.

a good experience for their users isn’t their goal

They are in tension with the more pressing goal of extracting revenue. But how do you extract revenue from a site that's mostly just "user content" + "ads" in an era when ad revenue is plummeting?

Maybe if they increase the prices on Reddit Gold?