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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to HN Browser, yet another Hacker News reader on iPhone

I thought building something that I would use while learning iOS SDK was a good idea so I built HN Browser. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hn-browser/id578535095?ls=1&mt=8 HN Browser is a simple app which lets you to read articles and comments on Hacker News. (no voting and writing comment yet) For the logo, I reached out to Joel Glovier(http://joelglovier.com) for his previous work on Hacker News logo(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4731140) and he kindly granted the use of his work. It was really fun experience to collaborate and build a mobile app using iOS SDK. (although…

HN Browser is an iPhone app that lets users read articles and comments from Hacker News. Built as a learning project for iOS development, it provides a simple mobile interface for browsing the site, though voting and… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. HN Browser, yet another Hacker News reader on iPhone launched in 2012; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    Alerts, AI summaries, and easy search for Hacker News

    2025 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2ID
  3. 3HN
  4. 4HN

    Since I got an iPad I was looking for a better Hacker News reading experience than the one you can get using the web version. On the iPhone I use the ihackernews.com web app (and soon going to try news.yc). It's decent for the iPhone, but it doesn't scale good on the iPad. To my surprise, when I checked there was no decent iPad app for HN (i.e. lacking ability to comment or vote, no readability support and more). I anyway wanted to give a try to iPad development, and was looking for an interesting project to work on. Making HN reader app seemed as a good candidate. Over the last weekend I…

    2011 · bit.ly · its alternatives →

  5. 5
    hn.▲78

    Yet another client to browse Hacker News

    2016 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6FH

    Hey HN. I created this website. https://pj4533.com/hn-overlooked/ It's just a simple web app that discovers overlooked posts on Hacker News. I created it because I was often coming to Hacker News and realizing that I was missing a lot of stuff, and there just didn't seem to be an easy way to surface content that was interesting to me but just didn't bubble up to the top of the page. So I built this. I got the idea a while back, one night when I was recording (you can watch it here, it's pretty funny: https://youtu.be/FDyDb4sX30w?si=E3rby-DaGWA6gy0R ). But I…

    2025 · pj4533.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7AH
  8. 8

    Hi! I’m Julien and I built a recommendation engine for Hacker News. I feel like this website is a gold mine. Every day, I find some very interesting stories about a topic. And sometimes, I want to find other stories covering that same topic but I can’t. Hacker News has years of history of awesome discussion and ressources. Unfortunately, I think HN Algolia isn’t helpful in searching these old threads. As a student, I want to learn a lot from this website. This is why I created HN Recommend. Input a sentence or the URL of an article, and get the most popular and similar posts from Hacker…

    2023 · hn-recommend.julienc.me · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    HN is great for the links people share, but a big part of the value I get comes from reading the discussion around them. I realized I was always opening the article in one tab and the comments in another, constantly switching back and forth. I figured there was probably a simpler way, so I threw together this userscript to merge the two. 1. Clicking a link from Hacker News opens the article with a side panel containing the discussion. It doesn't require your credentials, is resizable, and is easy to tweak if you want to customize it. 2. If you land on an article that has previously been…

    Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    I actually started it June 2011 to learn iOS, launched it in September, and have been steadily adding features and making improvements. It's something I use every day and I hope other people find it useful. Enjoy!

    2012 · itunes.apple.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11HC
  12. 12

    The Hacker News front page, with a short video explainer for every story.

    25d ago · hn.watch · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Hey HN, I made this free browser extension that modernizes the Hacker News design. I previously launched Modern for Wikipedia [1] here back in December, and it seemed like the obvious next choice to build one for HN too! So I've taken what I learned from building that, and have spent all my spare time this year building Modern for HN. I realize this won't be for everyone, but it was a fun project to work on, and I'm really happy with the result so far. Hope you like it too! Lots more planned for future updates, and suggestions welcome :) [1]…

    2022 · modernhn.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    I read HN on my phone every day and never really settled on a reader, so I wrote my own and finally tidied it up enough to put out there. It's plain SwiftUI with no third-party dependencies. A few things I spent the most time on: Comments are parsed and drawn as native text instead of being dumped into a web view. Links, italics, quotes and code blocks behave like the rest of the OS, text selection works, and threads collapse instantly. The whole comment tree comes back from the Algolia API in a single request, which felt a lot nicer than walking the Firebase API node by node. Accessibility.…

    Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Modern iOS app for reading Hacker News

    2019 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    A new experimental UI for Hacker News Search

    2015 · its alternatives →

  17. 17HA
  18. 18

    :boom: Progressive Hacker News client built with Angular - housseindjirdeh/angular2-hn

    2016 · github.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19AD

    We (Nick, Dens, Denzell, Fede, Drew, Aaryan, and Daniel) have been building HN Discovery, a discovery-focused search engine for Hacker News, in our spare time for the past 6 months and are excited to show it! It adds the following features relative to the existing keyword search interface and preserves the existing ones: - no-JS version (hnnojs.trieve.ai) - site:{required_site} and site:{negated-site} filters - public analytics - LLM generated query suggestions based on random stories - recommendations - dense vector semantic search - SPLADE fulltext search - RAG AI chat - order by…

    2024 · hn.trieve.ai · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Native mobile experience forged for Hacker News. Journey through stories, delve into comments, vote, post and more.

    Jul 2026 · hackernows.app · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    I love HN but always felt the search with algolia is okay but does have some limitations. Since I work at Vectara I decided to try and create a better search for HN. It's based on data from roughly the last 6 months of HN stories and comments. Would love to hear feedback and how useful this is relative to the existing search.

    2024 · hackernews.demo.vectara.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22
    HackerWeb▲189

    A simply readable Hacker News app

    2017 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23HN

    Hello everyone! This is a browser extension that attempts to enhance Hacker News user experience, while your data is kept secure, and private (never leaves the browser). Browsers have evolved significantly since doing a v1 back in 2010, which was one of the contributing factors, for attempting a complete re-take few months ago. Personally, I was surprised how useful it turned out to be when browsing around HN. On the linked page you can find install link(s) from web-browser stores, and demo video/screenshots of the features[1] What do you think ? [1] including, browsing content with…

    2023 · carina.app · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    A new simple and fast HN Reader for iOS

    2015 · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →