The Best Hacker News apps for iPhones
Hacker News is an awesome Reddit-like tech news site run by Y Combinator. For those who read Hacker News on their iPhones, it can be a daunting task determining which Hacker News app is the best, as there seems to be nearly a hundred of them in the App Store. Lucky for you, I tried them all, so you don’t have to.
Functionally, my primary criteria was:
- Threaded, collapsible comments
- Post comments
- Upvote stories and comments
- View user profiles and posting activity
- Dark theme
Outside of these, I wanted an app that looked good, meeting modern iOS design standards and respecting the notch.
It was quite a chore. I tried both free and paid apps, and most of them were bad, to say the least. A huge majority of them do not support logging into Hacker News accounts (or do, and don’t actually work). Many don’t even display comments.
Without further ado, here are the top 3 Hacker News apps for iOS, according to me!
- Octal for Hacker News
Octal is the Hacker News app I’ve been waiting for. Upon first launch, it’s clear that this app is both silky smooth and beautifully designed. Everything loads lightning fast, and there are nice Facebook-feed-esque loading animations for both submissions and comments, which make browsing a pleasure.
To most readers, including myself, the comment browsing experience is the most important part of a Hacker News app, and Octal’s is by and far the best. You can tap comment headers or swipe to collapse a comment thread, and the collapse animation itself is super smooth. A lot of apps with this feature tend to get this wrong.
The best thing that Octal does is something that no other Hacker News app I’ve seen does. When viewing a user’s comment activity, each comment displays which submission it is for, and tapping on it enters the submission’s comments view and jumps to where comment is. Simple, but very necessary for getting the context.
Lastly, Octal seems to be updated by the developer very frequently, recently obtaining 3D touch support!
2. Minihack
MiniHack has been around for a while, and is often the top search result when searching for Hacker News. Overall, I found the app to be excellent and performant, meeting my functional requirements and including the ability to search, which Octal doesn’t.
Additionally, this app could use a better design. It has a fairly plain UI, and could definitely use some fit and finish.
Functionality, it has the ability to displays a user’s comment activity, but doesn’t display any context for each comment, which is unfortunate. Tapping on a user comment enters the submission’s comments view, but doesn’t show where the comment is. This is very annoying for submissions with any more than a handful of comments.
3. Boreal
At a distant 3rd is Boreal.
The most promising aspect of Boreal is its UI/IX. It has very unique and well-designed user interface, featuring the ability to swipe between tabs at the top.
However, a major issue with this app is accessibility. The main theme uses grey text on a white-ish background, while the dark theme uses grey on a black-ish background. Both options lack contrast and strain the eyes.
More annoying, this app does not allow collapsing of top-level comments. You must double tap to collapse a comment, and it only collapses the children of the double-tapped comment. This is a major hindrence to quickly speeding through popular submissions.
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tl;dr:
Octal is the best HN app. MiniHack is a close second. Pass on Boreal.