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.…
Ember, a native iOS Hacker News reader I built around accessibility launched on June 20, 2026 with 103 votes, #369 of 22,647 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches.
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
Ember — a native, accessible Hacker News reader for iOS, built in SwiftUI with no third-party dependencies. - DatanoiseTV/ember-hackernews
A native Hacker News reader for iPhone, iPad, and Mac — calm, fast, and built for everyone. Ember is a SwiftUI app that reads Hacker News the way a native app should: threaded comments rendered natively, clean reading typography, a personalized first-run setup, full dark mode, offline reading, and accessibility treated as a feature rather than an afterthought. One codebase adapts from a tab bar on iPhone to a three-pane layout on Mac and iPad — and an experimental Android build shares the same Swift via Skip . Accessibility is a first-class part of Ember, with particular care for color vision. Sources/ App/ App entry, root tab view, environment wiring, in-app Safari Models/ HNItem, HNUser,…from github.com
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.…
Does a similar job
all alternatives →- AEAn embitious Hacker News reader built with Ember.js2015 · chancancode.github.io · ▲48
I developed a native macOS Hacker News client2021 · github.com · ▲188macOS HackerNews client that aims to be a Mac-assed Mac app. Written in Swift + AppKit. - goranmoomin/HackerNews
A native macOS client for Hacker News, built with SwiftUIFeb 2026 · github.com · ▲265Hey HN! I built a native macOS desktop client for Hacker News and I'm open-sourcing it under the MIT license. GitHub: https://github.com/IronsideXXVI/Hacker-News Download (signed & notarized DMG, macOS 14.0+): https://github.com/IronsideXXVI/Hacker-News/releases Screenshots: https://github.com/IronsideXXVI/Hacker-News#screenshots I spend a lot of time reading HN — I wanted something that felt like a proper Mac app: a sidebar for browsing stories, an integrated reader for articles, and comment threading — all in one window.…
I made an iOS HN app to navigate large threads without getting lost2023 · apps.apple.com · ▲94I was struggling with navigating HN discussions using existing solutions, so I decided to implement a completely different approach, think of it as depth-first reading vs breadth-first reading. Visually it looks like swipeable stacks of comments and it offers several advantages over traditional interfaces: - Comment width doesn't get narrower no matter how deep in the comment tree you are - You always see the parent of the comment you're currently reading - Swiping allows you to move in and out of subtrees with animated transitions that you fully control - You can easily skip subtrees that…
A native Hacker News reader with integrated todo/done tracking2025 · github.com · ▲54Hey HN! I'm excited to share a tool I've been working on - a native Hacker News reader built with Rust and egui. Here's a screenshot: https://github.com/haojiang99/hacker_news_reader/blob/main/s.... As a daily HN reader, I've always struggled with keeping track of interesting posts I want to read later. Browser tabs pile up, bookmarks get forgotten, and I lose track of what I've already read. I needed a way to: 1. Browse HN efficiently (across all sections - hot, new, show, ask, jobs, best) 2. Quickly mark posts as "todo" for later reading 3. Mark posts as…
A simple Hackernews client for iOS and Android2025 · github.com · ▲40We 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:…
More dev tools this month
the category →
open-source IDE for thoughtful software design. Contribute to devdotfast/whiteboard development by creating an account on GitHub.
Dev tools · 28d ago · github.com
Contribute to reladraw/reladraw development by creating an account on GitHub.
Dev tools · 26d ago · github.com
OpenBot▲362Grok Bot alternative: free, local, open-source, multiplayer
Dev tools · 23d ago · openbot.run
Talanoa▲346Hi HN, I’m a fullstack developer, and honestly, I’ve lost count of how many side projects I’ve worked on over the years. But one idea kept coming back to me: a different kind of email client. It first came to me in 2014: “What if we could handle emails more like conversations?” Every year, I’d revisit this concept in my “Build Notes.” Ten years later, no one had built exactly what I had in mind — so I finally decided to do it myself. That’s how Talanoa was born. I wanted something focused on people, not timelines. I was tired of marking messages as unread just to remember to reply later, or…
Dev tools · 21d ago · talanoa.email
CoreSpeed▲332One MCP for everything your agents need: apps, memory, tools
Dev tools · 28d ago · corespeed.io
Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part
Launched alongside, June 2026
the whole month →
Fundraisly▲1,537AI fundraising agent that finds investors and books meetings
AI · Jun 2026 · fundraisly.com
Homebrew 6.0.0▲1,481Today, I’m proud to announce Homebrew 6.0.0. The most significant changes since 5.1.0 are a new tap trust security mechanism, the new faster, smaller, default internal Homebrew JSON API, sandboxing on Linux, better defaults informed by our user survey, many brew bundle improvements, improved performance and initial support for macOS 27 (Golden Gate). Happy to discuss any questions here!
Dev tools · Jun 2026 · brew.sh
Hi HN! I was super frustrated at apps like tiktok and wechat preventing me from saving or downloading the animated gifs, so I made a little tool to turn a screen recording into a slack-sized emoji. Hope you get some value from this!
Life & fun · Jun 2026 · vorpus.github.io
Search 18 years of Hacker News and chart how any topic, tool, or person trended. Overlay terms to compare their rise and fall across 45M posts and comments.
Life & fun · Jun 2026 · hackernewstrends.com