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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to HNWidgets – Hacker News Widget for iOS

As an avid HN user I wanted to have a simple widget showing me the top links shared on here, I also wanted to experiment for the first time with WidgetKit, this is what I came up with. HNWidgets is open source and offers a simple widget in three different sizes (medium, large, extra-large). You can choose between different HN lists to fetch links from and how frequently the widget should refresh its content. It's currently being rolled out on the App Store so the link in the README might still not work for some people. Hope you find it useful!

HNWidgets is an open-source iOS widget that displays top links from Hacker News directly on a device's home screen. Available in three sizes—medium, large, and extra-large—it lets users select which Hacker News lists… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. HNWidgets – Hacker News Widget for iOS launched in 2023; 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. 2

    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 →

  3. 3
    hn.▲78

    Yet another client to browse Hacker News

    2016 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4ID
  5. 5HA
  6. 6

    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…

    2012 · itunes.apple.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    HN Deck: An alternate way to browse Hacker News

    2020 · hndeck.sagunshrestha.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8HT
  9. 9

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

    24d ago · hn.watch · its alternatives →

  10. 10

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

    2016 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11IC

    2016 · hackernews.club · its alternatives →

  12. 12AH
  13. 13HN

    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 →

  14. 14AH

    This app and widget and related code is free to use for anyone. This was a side project to learn Android, Kotlin and the many libraries that came along with it. Screenshots in the Google Play link above. app code: https://github.com/ddxv/hackernews-app backend api: https://github.com/ddxv/hackernews-api There are many Hacker News apps, but this one focused on two features: - Widgets: This app supports dynamic widgets using Compose Glance. The widgets can be themed and set up with one of the three main categories: "New", "Top" and "Best". - Themes: Both…

    2023 · play.google.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    sleeek tui for hacker news. Contribute to ahmd-sh/hntui development by creating an account on GitHub.

    25d ago · github.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16FH

    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 →

  17. 17HN
  18. 18
    HackerWeb▲189

    A simply readable Hacker News app

    2017 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    This is probably the first Hacker News client on AppStore that uses the newly introduced official Firebase HN API. One of the cool features of the new API are updates pushed in real time. There’s...

    2014 · hnclient.weebly.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Hi folks, I've built an alternative Hacker News front page. It is inspired by and meant to be a replacement for hckrnews.com. I built this because HN is woefully underfeatured, but most sites that try to improve it seem to assume that the visual design is the problem. hcker.news tries to maintain HN's familiarity while adding useful enhancements. There are three primary views: - Timeline View: Browse top stories by votes or comments grouped by day, week, or month (e.g., top 20 per day, top 100 per week). - Aggregate View: See top stories by votes or comments over custom time ranges. - Front…

    2025 · hcker.news · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    A new experimental UI for Hacker News Search

    2015 · its alternatives →

  22. 22PF

    My first python app, it displays posts from hacker news that is tagged under "Show HN"...

    2013 · showhnapp.herokuapp.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    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 →

  24. 24

    We at Emerge Tools (YC W21) recently released open source Hacker News apps for both iOS and Android. The apps use the latest SwiftUI and Compose frameworks and are entirely native. Our goal is to help dogfood our products, but more importantly our team just enjoys reading HN every day and wanted an app to hack on and call our own. :) We are still missing some features but should otherwise be pretty solid. And open to any contributions. iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hacker-news-by-emerge/id674092... Android:…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

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