Hackers for Hacker News 13+
Hacker News for iPhone & iPad
Weiran Zhang
Designed for iPad
-
- Free
- Offers In-App Purchases
Screenshots
Description
Hackers is the best way to browse Hacker News on iPhone and iPad. It’s fast, beautiful, and thoughtfully accessible — designed to keep you in the flow of reading and discussion.
• Effortless reading. Clean typography and a distraction-free layout put the content first.
• Made for long threads. Collapse, expand, and navigate nested comments with a tap — or swipe to move through deep conversations without losing your place.
• Swipe to act. Vote on posts and comments with simple, familiar gestures.
• All the essentials. Thumbnails on posts, quick jump to comments, in-thread link handling, and blazing-fast feed pagination.
• Native to the core. Universal iPhone & iPad app, Safari View Controller for articles, iPad multitasking, Share Extension (“Open in Hackers”), and great performance.
• Accessibility first. Dynamic Type, VoiceOver-friendly structure, high-contrast themes, and careful focus order make Hackers comfortable for every reader.
• Open source. Transparent by design — explore the code, file issues, and contribute on GitHub.
Why Hackers?
• A decade of refinement focused on a simple goal: make Hacker News feel great on iOS.
• Privacy-respecting. The app collects no data. Period.
Hackers is an open source project, check it out on GitHub: https://github.com/weiran/Hackers
What’s New
Version 5.2.0
• Find what you need faster with smarter search, personalised feed defaults, and flexible thumbnail controls.
• Save favourites across all your devices with synced bookmarks and a smoother feed and comments experience.
• Visit Settings to tip or subscribe, keep Hackers improving, and help the app stay free.
Ratings and Reviews
Really good
Love the dark mode support. The app is pretty quick to start.
Living in London, is love the ability to download the comments for a few articles before I go underground in the tube (with no reception). An offline viewing feature would be most appreciated.
One big flaw
If you want to open an article’s comment page in a web browser (eg. to post a comment, bookmark it, etc), you have to go through a weirdly long series of manual steps: tap the share button, tap “Hacker News link”, and then wait several mysterious seconds (even on an iPhone 12 Pro) until the share options appear. Then you tap ‘Copy’, then manually open your browser and paste the link and visit the site. It’s very odd. And it’s even worse if you want to open a specific comment, as the app doesn’t offer a way to go straight to a comment, so you have to manually find the comment on the web after completing the above steps.
It’s a great app in most other ways. I just find the above issue significantly annoying, to the point that I really resent using the app. I wonder if it’s a deliberate design decision aiming to reduce reactionary outrage comments, by forcing people to ‘take a breath’? If that’s the intent, I think it has the opposite effect on me, because I’m not taking a breath when I’m jumping through hoops.
Great app, could do with some tweaks
Great design, responsive and intuitive. However, I find the headline view a bit difficult to scan over as everything sort of merges into one. Would be nice to have a dark mode for the app too, to help nighttime reading.
App Privacy
The developer, Weiran Zhang, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy.
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Privacy practices may vary based on, for example, the features you use or your age. Learn More
Information
- Provider
- Weiran Zhang
- Size
- 3.8 MB
- Category
- News
- Compatibility
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- iPhone
- Requires iOS 26.0 or later.
- iPad
- Requires iPadOS 26.0 or later.
- Mac
- Requires macOS 26.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later.
- Apple Vision
- Requires visionOS 26.0 or later.
- Languages
-
English
- Age Rating
- Learn More
- Infrequent Cartoon or Fantasy Violence Realistic Violence Profanity or Crude Humour
- Copyright
- © Weiran Zhang
- Price
- Free
- In-App Purchases
-
- Generous Tip £6.99
- Nice Tip £2.99
- Quick Tip £0.99
- Hackers Supporter £0.99