Ember, a native iOS Hacker News reader I built around accessibility
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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.
HN · launched Jun 20, 2026 · 103 upvotes (top 8%) · 0 views
Niche: news aggregation platforms · 244 launches, 12 in the last 7 days ▼ -54% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Vertical SaaS
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 244 launches in news aggregation platforms →
Could you build this?
Yes It is a native SwiftUI client for the public Hacker News Firebase API focusing on native Text views and standard accessibility modifiers.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Octal, Ironside, hackfeed, Apollo
Concerns raised: Slow PR review and merge process causing development delays, Potential copyright infringement risk for App Store listing, App Store approval uncertainty and restrictive permissions, Accessibility issues - pinch/zoom workaround indicates poor responsive design
Feature requests: Make available on TestFlight, Android build support, HN login, comments, replies, and edit functionality, Installation instructions for non-iOS developers, Better dynamic text size support
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 205 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #39 of 206 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 234 days after the earliest competitor.
- A native macOS client for Hacker News, built with SwiftUI · hn · 2026-02-20 · 265 upvotes · similarity 0.62
- HackLens · hn · 2026-01-03 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Rdltr · hn · 2026-09-09 · 24 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Moji · hn · 2026-03-06 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- A fast, offline Markdown viewer for macOS built in Swift · hn · 2026-09-22 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- HN Companion · hn · 2026-02-10 · 31 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Orate · hn · 2026-07-21 · 17 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- A 4.8MB native iOS voice notes app built with SwiftUI · hn · 2026-01-27 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.43
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