HACK for Hacker News Reader 17+
Developer coding tech startup
Pranoy Chowdhury
-
- Free
- Offers In-App Purchases
Screenshots
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:
pran@pranapps.com
What’s New
Version 109
- Thanks to Moritz for this feature request: The "menu" list was getting way too long and crowded with so many options. Now you can customize it by disabling options which you don't need. Go to app's home page, then tap settings, then scroll all the way down to "Edit menu options".
- Likely fixed a crash issue on iOS 12 devices. If this issue persists, please email me as testing on older devices is limited and I need more details.
- Added a much requested feature of swiping on the right edge of the screen to bring back the last page. So, if you accidentally swipe left to go back, then you can now swipe from the right edge of screen to undo it. This can be done to undo multiple pages too.
- Swipe to favourite/vote now works even if you have full screen swipe to go back enabled.
- These 2 features took significant work, so supporting me with an in app purchase or tip is appreciated. Thanks.
- The app is supported on MacOS too.
- I need to run my own server for caching high quality favicons shown in the app plus for push notifications for replies to hacker news posts. So if you can help support the server costs, please buy the one time only in app purchase. This also unlocks custom fonts, colors and icons.
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 only in app purchase! No subscriptions! Thank you for your support!
This update wouldn't have been possible without the amazing feedback from HN and Reddit! If you have any feedback or feature requests or bug reports, please email Pran at:
pran@pranapps.com
----
Previous update:
- Added 8 new sharing options for copying and sharing the title + link together and in markdown format.
- Fixed bugs for the URL scheme.
Ratings and Reviews
Best ios hackernews app
This app is the best app for hackernews that I’ve tried on iOS and I’ve tried a couple of them. It’s so good I paid for the pro version and it’s even better with the latest update. I really like all the settings/options.
One suggestion I would have though would be adding a right swipe to go back to the previous page(basically the opposite of the left swipe). Apollo has this enabled by default. Another suggestion would be adding the ability to swipe away the long press options or hiding those options behind an overflow menu because I always find myself accidentally long pressing comments and bringing up the menu.
Developer Response ,
Today's update adds a button to the posts and comments to show the overflow menu. There's also 2 settings which you can use to disable the long press menu.
As for right swipe to go back, I will add that in another update, need to do some research. Thanks.
Best so far
No purchase needed, no ads. Probably will pay the $5 to support the dev, though, because this kind of functionality is rare for ios apps without either ads or in-app purchases. Quite the hidden gem. Lots of settings to choose from. I especially like being able to select the text of a comment to copy by long-pressing on a comment, and from there, there are a lot of options, including copying the text as a whole, or selecting a certain part of the text as it pops up with the options. Now will look for other apps made by this dev! Edit: decided to purchase, it’s worth it
Developer Response ,
Thank you for the kind feedback! Glad you are supporting me :) you can look at my other apps like MoodWell mood tracker which is also without any ads/trackers/subscription.
Best app for Hacker News.
I continue to be impressed by this app. What started out as just a beautiful wrapper for HN has continued to evolve into easily one of the best experiences on iOS for consuming feeds, á la Apollo for Reddit. I have also had great success reaching out to the developer, as others mention.
I recently noticed that there is a Share as Image feature, which is one of my biggest uses in Apollo - wow! Works great in HACK too!
Easily worth the download and the purchase for premium. A+. Thanks Pranoy!
App Privacy
The developer, Pranoy Chowdhury, 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, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More
Information
- Seller
- Pranoy Chowdhury
- Size
- 12.9 MB
- Category
- News
- Compatibility
-
- iPhone
- Requires iOS 11.0 or later.
- iPad
- Requires iPadOS 11.0 or later.
- iPod touch
- Requires iOS 11.0 or later.
- Mac
- Requires macOS 10.15 or later.
- Apple Vision
- Requires visionOS 1.0 or later.
- Languages
-
English
- Age Rating
- 17+ Unrestricted Web Access
- Copyright
- © Pranapps
- Price
- Free
- In-App Purchases
-
- Hack Premium $7.99
- Kind Tip $2.99
- Godzilla Tip $9.99
- Amazing Tip $6.99
- Generous Tip $4.99
- Nice Tip $1.99
Supports
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Family Sharing
Some in‑app purchases, including subscriptions, may be shareable with your family group when Family Sharing is enabled.