I think it was an uphill struggle and nearly impossible to pull off.

Spez had absolutely no interest in changing his stance on working with developers. The hugely ironic thing I read that made me give up hope (and stash my ~1 year in development Reddit App) was Spez saying "It was never designed to support third-party apps." -- yet no acknowledgement that the "official" app was literally a third party app that they purchased years ago called Alien Blue.

Source