It just worked. You could swipe to vote and to comment. You had the ability to read messages mid thread. It looked good. It was also the spiritual successor of alienblue, an app that was well loved and bought out by Reddit to make their official app which retained very few similarities.
And beyond all that the dev worked hard, communicated with users, and was extremely up front about how Reddit screwed him over with the API change. He’s the one that Huffman accused of threatening Reddit. The other app devs didn’t record their interactions with Reddit.