Swarm, an offline family tree app for macOS
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Hi HN! My wife and I got deep into our family genealogy and wanted to map out all our relatives - but keep the data on our own Macs instead of uploading it to a genealogy service. Nothing we found did that, so we built Swarm, a native macOS app in Swift.It's built on GEDCOM 5.5.1, the universal genealogy file standard, so your tree exports cleanly to other ancestry apps if you ever want out. Example trees of famous historical families are included to play with.Features: multiple ancestry views (tree, fan, world map), media files, GEDCOM import/export, PDF export, tree merging, and kinship naming.Fully open source, no AI in the app, no internet connection required, no account required. Would appreciate any feedback!
HN · launched Sep 20, 2026 · 7 upvotes (top 56%) · 0 views
Niche: family organizer and household apps · 205 launches, 16 in the last 7 days ▲ +45% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Content generation
- B2C
- Not AI
- Commercial product
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 205 launches in family organizer and household apps →
Could you build this?
Yes An offline macOS app built in Swift/SwiftUI that parses GEDCOM 5.5.1 files and displays a family tree graph can be easily vibe-coded using standard Swift libraries and graph layout algorithms.
Discussion
5 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Ancestry, FamilyTree.org
Concerns raised: Handling and merging large family trees
Feature requests: Online search to populate tree from external sources, Support references to FamilyTree.org identifiers
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 69 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #36 of 70 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 326 days after the earliest competitor.
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- f-tree · ph · 2026-10-20 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- A simple, auto-layout family tree generator · hn · 2026-03-06 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- My Family Tree · ph · 2026-09-22 · 4 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- FamTwig · ph · 2026-10-23 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Familión · ph · 2026-09-16 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Shajra-e-Nasab · ph · 2026-10-06 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- A Thousand Surnames · ph · 2026-10-29 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.43
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