They already did that kinda. They bought Alien Blue, which was the top iOS Reddit client before Apollo. They brought the dev onboard, sunsetted the Alien Blue app in favor of a new official Reddit mobile app, and gave all of the users who had purchased it a few years of Reddit Gold credit.

I think that app may be the basis of the current Reddit app somewhere deep down inside, but it basically bears no resemblance at this point since Reddit's priority is chasing ad revenue and TikTok style feeds instead of just letting people follow and comment in their communities.

This of course left a gap for a new good iOS client and Apollo was born.

If they bought Apollo I'm sure the same cycle would occur again.

I think this could be an implicit coercion attempt to get the app on the cheap leveraging lack of the alternatives for the developer

The irony is they already did that with Alien Blue, and now we’re here.