Ask HN: Hacker News API is inconsistent?

I'm using multiple Android apps for reading hackernews (Harmonic, Hacki, Materialistic), all of them struggle to fetch the current top news (frontpage news). I often need to refresh multiple times to get them to work. That specific endpoint feels like aggressively throttled.

However the web version works just fine.

Is it just me? Are other people facing the same problem?