Ember, a native iOS Hacker News reader I built around accessibility
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.…
In plain words
Ember is a native iOS app for reading Hacker News, built with accessibility as a core focus. It renders comments as native text rather than web views, enabling features like text selection, instant thread collapse, and proper formatting of links and code blocks. The app uses SwiftUI with no third-party dependencies and fetches entire comment trees in a single API request. Accessibility features include VoiceOver support, Dynamic Type, Reduce Motion respect, color-blind mode, and design that doesn't rely solely on color for information.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
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. Nothing depends on color on its own, so points, read state and selection all carry a shape or an icon too. VoiceOver reads each story as one coherent element with proper actions, Dynamic Type and Reduce Motion are respected, and there's a color-blind mode. The first-run setup actually looks at your device's accessibility settings, switches on the matching options, and tells you what it changed instead of making you hunt for them. Then the usual things you'd expect: Top/New/Best/Ask/Show/Jobs, search, saved stories, read tracking, an in-app reader, light and dark, and a handful of accent colors. It only talks to the public HN APIs, there's no account and nothing is tracked. Source and screenshots are in the repo. I'd most like feedback on the comment rendering and the accessibility choices, since those were the parts I cared about getting right. Happy to answer anything about how it's put together.
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