HACK for Hacker News Reader
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Description

HACK for YC's Hacker News is the most beautiful and easy way to read about the latest tech, startup and STEM news.

- No Ads. No subscriptions.
- Login or Register your Hacker News account
- Supported on MacOS
- PUSH NOTIFICATIONS for Hacker News replies to comment or post
- Comments are presented in nested threads
- Tap a comment to collapse that thread
- Swipe left or right on stories and comments to upvote and favorite
- Ability to submit new posts including drafts
- Long press a story, link or comment to share
- iPad supports split view
- On iPads, you can drag a story / comment / story's image (link) to open it in safari in split view. This is useful for when you are viewing the app in split view / multitasking and like opening the link / story / comment in a browser side by side.
- Landscape and Portrait support
- 3D touch for peek, pop support
- Home screen 3D touch shortcuts
- Hide posts from the feed
- Tap the bottom button to scroll to the next root comment in the thread. Long press it to go to the previous one
- All known hacker news endpoints - News, front page, Ask HN, Show HN, Show HN Newest, classic, active, best stories, best comments, new stories, new comments, noob stories, noob comments, jobs, over 100-500 points
- Submit posts, reply, comment using your HN account
- Browse top 100 leader accounts
- Browse stories from a specific site, user or date
- Search in comments and usernames! Search is case and diacritic insensitive and ignores punctuations. Search uses an CONTAINS, OR operation if multiple words are typed.
- Can select / highlight the comment/post title text for lookup/copy/translate etc iOS native operations.
- Powerful search (powered by Algolia API) - use @date to sort by date, #story to filter for stories, #comments to filter for comments, #author_username to filter by user etc. These tags can be separated by commas. Refer to https://hn.algolia.com/api for more tags.
- Dark mode - both pure black and gray mode
- Low contrast text mode to make the text not be pure white #FFFFFF
- Many color choices & color picker for customization
- App icons in variety of colours for light and dark mode
- Font choices
- Ability to change font sizes, padding etc to make the layout as compact as you like!
- Threaded comments with color bar to maintain visual orientation
- Articles open in Safari view with setting to automatically open in "readability" mode
- Tap the domain in a story to see all stories from that site
- Tap the username in a story or comment to go to the user profile
- Browse your submitted stories and comments, favorited stories and comments, upvoted stories and comments
- Archive: View an archive of the post website. archive.is, archive.org & google cache.
- Share comment as image
- Articles can be opened in built in safari or 3rd party browsers. Supports Brave, Firefox, Firefox Focus, Orion, Opera Touch, Dolphin, DuckDuckGo, iCab Mobile, Microsoft Edge and Chrome. Go to settings > Disable the "Use in-app Safari" setting > tap that row to change the default browser.
- I run my own server for caching high quality favicons shown in the app plus for push notifications for replies. So if you can help support the server costs, please buy the one time only in app purchase. This also unlocks custom fonts, colors & icons.

All stories and comments are via Algolia API and Hacker News API:
https://news.ycombinator.com/
https://hn.algolia.com/api
https://github.com/HackerNews/API

Profile picture robots lovingly delivered by Robohash.org

I offer an ad and analytics free and beautiful app for the absolute best experience for my users. If you are enjoying the app, please leave me a positive rating on the app store as that helps get the word out to others. If you would like to support development and buy me a coffee, you can purchase the one time in app purchase! No subscriptions! Thank you for your support!

If you have any feedback or feature requests, please email Pran at:
[email protected]
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In-Apps

Kind Tip
2,99 €
Nice Tip
1,99 €
Amazing Tip
7,99 €
Generous Tip
5,99 €
Godzilla Tip
9,99 €
Hack Premium
8,99 €

Screenshots

User Rating

4.63 out of 5

142 ratings in Germany

5 star
114
4 star
16
3 star
6
2 star
0
1 star
6

Ratings History

Reviews

Works fine, but easily forgets where you were

Ash Tyler on

New design works fine, but seems a bit slower to start up (doesn’t seem to cache the list of stories between app restart for example). However, if you start reading comments of a specific story, stop in the middle and do something with your life; when you go back to that app, it doesn’t bring you back on that story, but drops you on the “home” page instead. It’s so annoying that I now tend to open comments in safari, because I know safari won’t forget my tab ever. The old version used to be better with that (and it’s not a RAM issue, because I have very few apps opened and the latest iPhone). Last point that I wish was better: the down arrow to move to another comment thread is a bit small, and it’s too easy to tab right on top of it and fold a comment chain closes instead. I wish the click target would be bigger.

Sweet app with infinite customizations

0x0007 on

Just love it. I didn’t know if I want to pay or I will regret it but I love the app, it is customizable AF and just gets out of the way. A superb reader.

Great. I don’t like the way of monetizing.

hdorifbelelnd on

Thanks to the developer response, I’ve decided to update my unfair review. I agree that it’s fair, but a dark mode, in my opinion, is a essential feature, that you shouldn’t have to turn on every time you open the app. You’re playing with the annoyance of your users. I do understand that it’s hard to monetize, and this is a clever way of doing it. I just feel you should make a great app, and put even greater features behind a paywall. See Apollo‘s gif scrubbing. You made a great app.

Excellent Hacker News App

demanding-user on

This is how software should be made. Lightweight, highly performant, beautiful experience and the cherry on top is a very responsive developer. Thank you Pran!

Great UI but sometimes frustrating

A very long-term customer on

Nice UI thanks. Please reassess the reasonability of hiding an item on long swipe to the left, it’s contrary to setting a star but can inadvertently produce the opposite behavior when swiped too far to the left, and then make the user look for the place where it can be restored. Totally confusing and frustrating. Oh and some other app here on AppStore provides live analytics to post interactions. Would be nice to have a couple plots here too. Otherwise a great upgrade over the default HTML interface, with extras well worth the current price tag.

First Review I do in 10 years

Altaiiiir on

What a great app, offers the entirety of hacker news without ads in great readability. No dark patterns, no annoying “reminders” that try to sell me a pro version. And most importantly, since I use this app I browse Reddit on my phone much less frequently. Big thanks to both HN and the developer of this app. Ps: All I could wish for is a way to save posts just for me, as favoriting posts is a public function in hacker news.

Best hacker news reader

pchangr on

I tried lots of Hacker News.. but they are all full of shiny bells and features I don’t need. I wanted something simple, minimal and a great dark theme. This is exactly it. A Hacker News reader that just works .. every link is open in reader mode by default .. and dark theme is beautiful.. even has a true black mode so I can read for hours comfortably if I want to. On top of that, the developer is super responsive. I reported a bug and it was fixed and available to download in 3 days. What’s not to love? I really wish more apps were like this.

Can’t buy premium

Snickers90 on

Doesn’t work, error message „ Purchase Failed: The operation couldn't be completed.(SKErrorDomain error O.)“ with iPhone XS latest iOS 15, wlan or sim

Great app

mectag on

One of the best HN apps - great features - looks great - customisable

Best HN client available

theomiles on

Great attention to detail and a lot of functionality packed into this app, it’s also frequently updated. The developer Pran is also super responsive when sending feedback. Highly recommend purchasing the paid upgrade to support it’s ongoing development.

Store Rankings

Ranking History

Category Rankings

Chart
Category
Rank
Top Free
54
Top Free
69
Top Free
80
Top Free
84
Top Free
91

Keywords

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App Info

Category
News
Publisher
Pranoy Chowdhury
Languages
English
Recent version
110 (2 months ago )
Released on
May 26, 2019 (5 years ago )
Last updated
1 week ago