Hacker News Reader

Comment by travoc | Hacker News Reader

I always assumed that someone had lost the source for the iOS app and that’s why we’re stuck with the broken thing.

There is no official HN app, for any OS. People have made multiple unofficial ones, using the API, though.

And many kinda work but are no longer mantained. Such is the fate of the iOS app previously mentioned and of Materialistic (Android)

I use Materialistic. Is there a better one?

I'm currently using Harmonic for Android after Materialistic irritated me too many times and while it's definitely got some issues, it works well enough for casual use

I would be completely happy with Harmonic except for 3 issues and I'm not sure if the one can be resolved because every Android HN API using app I have tried has the same issue.

The first issue is that long comments are difficult to type because the text box doesn't scroll the content. You end up typing blind. I'm already doing so now.

The 2nd is that you can you can copy part of a comment.

The 3rd and the one that I've experienced across clients is that dead comments are displayed. I would like to not see dead comments.akimg this a setting would be fine.

Yeah I've faced both of the first 2 issues. I'd also like to add that it has no options for searching which makes it useless since I want recent results, not something years ago

I read it on my iphone in the browser, and it is fine. It never even occurred to me that it would need an app. One of the best features of the site is that it does not need an app, and one can browse it while seated in the little room.

There's an app? Why??

It's the plainest of websites. I've been using it on android and iPhone for years without ever thinking "oh boy this would be better with an installable update able app asking me permissions and doing who knows what on my device". I assume any apps out there would be 3rd party scrapers...

I use materialistic on the phone. Design is nicer for mobile, plus I'm addicted to dark mode.

I use Hermit to appify often accessed pages, you get a Hackernews icon on your Android desktop that behaves exactly like an app, has its own cookie jar that does not leak browsing information etc.

The interface paradigm of mobile devices is built around apps, mobile browsers are a pain in the butt - deliberately, most likely.

I use https://github.com/weiran/Hackers because it’s nice to read on, but then to comment I have to use the site, so yea lol

If there was a dark mode on the site I’d just use that

Octal lets you comment from the app, if that’s something you are missing.

Oh cool, thanks I’ll take a look

Most 3rd apps use the Hackernews API https://github.com/cheeaun/awesome-hacker-news https://github.com/HackerNews/API

Having tried to write an HN client myself, I can assure you most of them scrape instead of using the API. The API is basically read only, is impractical for things like loading a full tree of comments (get ready to make an API call for every comment) and you need to scrape if you want things like “what auth hash do I need in order to upvote this particular comment via POST”.

> that’s why we’re stuck with the broken thing

I've been using HN for 10+ years but I don't think I've ever found anything that was broken. What are you referring to exactly?

> for the iOS app

HN doesn't have any iOS app nor any other app for that matter. So I'm guessing the author must confuse HN with something else.

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