Hacker News App Comparison for Android | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News App Comparison for Android

thomas.do

74 pointskjemperud32 comments

I actually prefer http://cheeaun.github.com/hnmobile/ over any native app on my Android. It's fast, pretty and hasn't let me down yet.

This looks pretty good. However, is there a way you can view the New category in this?

I don't think there is. One could open a feature request on the Github page[0], though.

[0] https://github.com/cheeaun/hnmobile/issues

Warning, above link breaks the back button to an infinite redirection loop. Longclick it to skip more than one page backwards (at least in Opera).

You mean it happens on Opera desktop browser or on Android? And which version?

Nope, the normal desktop one. 12.10 Build 1652 on Linux.

You might want to do test this again on a tablet. I only found one or two apps that used dual panes - IMHO a key feature for reading on a tablet.

Good idea. Which ones looked good on tablets? I don't have an Android tablet at the moment :(

I have a Prime, and I remember going through all the available apps ~6 months ago and uninstalling them all.

They were either bad apps in general or were potentially nice phone-sized apps with no optimisation done for tablets. When I say optimisation I'm referring to both the UI layout and the general rendering performance. For some reason (I'm not an android dev) certain apps have performance issues that scale with your pixel count (I guess they are hand-rendering things themselves and simply Doing It Wrong) and make them unusable.

I can't remember which though, so I'll install your top two when I get home (~8-10hrs) and report back.

Thanks! Looking forward to hear your results. If any of them works well on your Prime, could you email me some screenshots? thomas at kjemperud dot net

Gah! So, I tried your top three and im sorry to report it's a trifecta of failure: Hacker News Beta renders really s owly, Hacker News Android performs well but doesn't support landscape (it stays in profile) and Hacker News Droid performs Ok, rotates in landscape but without a useful or optimised layout, and as you state doesn't let you log in.

Okay, thanks for the update! I'll see if I can get my hands on an Android tablet and make a follow-up test :)

HackerNews HD+ is a great one.

Another thing to test is whether the app respects the portrait/landscape orientation. I use Ricky's app to vote and post, but I'll stick with Manuel's reader for everything else: it respects the page orientation, displays comment nesting clearly and allows me to collapse comment threads. Plus, it has a button to let me refresh what I'm reading, in case I want to do it more often than it already does automatically.

I just did a very similar review, focusing on Nexus 7 compatibility. We came to similar conclusions (so, evidently, a well designed Android app works for multiple screen sizes): http://www.iqdupont.com/blog/2012/11/10/finding-a-good-hacke...

It's not a native app, but I've enjoyed http://ihackernews.com for some time now.

I tried three native apps and had problems with all of them. I recently switched to ihackernews, and everything's been great. The hidden killer feature is that you can use browser-provided tabs.

Also, iHackerNews has links to 'viewtext' on the article, which works on about 75% of articles that I've tried, and saves a lot of badnwidth/cpu/ram.

The viewtext service is also incredibly awesome for printing out articles on paper -- I've found it to be much better than even the custom "print" versions of many articles, and certainly better than readability, etc.

I can't login with ihackernews, nor comment. is this normal?

Thanks for sharing this list. HN is one if the few things I semi regularly read and I'm ecstatic so far that I can use my note to participate on hn and continue to keep my laptop as a workspace first.

I tested them all, there is always something that make it a worst experience than using a browser, for exemple when it lost the position in the comment thread. So now I rely exclusively to Chrome.

Could someone point me to a similar Win 8 comparison?

Mobile version this web page would be better IMHO.

Agree. I've found the web view in Pocket (and probably other apps with built-in web views) to do a better job of displaying HN comment pages than any of the browsers I tried, though. Simply because it wraps the comments at a comfortable line length.

Weird, I just completed a very similar review, but focused on tablet (Nexus 7) support. We came to very similar conclusions: http://www.iqdupont.com/blog/2012/11/10/finding-a-good-hacke...

Hacker News Full by Chad Etzel only stopped working in the last day or two (probably something with the API it uses), but is my favorite app. Hopefully it gets an update or otherwise starts working again.

If you know any other apps worth including, please let me know :)

HNdroid Hacker News Client

Read and comment to stories posted on news.ycombinator.com

http://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=hacker%20news...

https://github.com/manmal/hn-android/

HackerNewsBot is my favorite

This review doesn't reflect (my) daily usage. Hacker News Beta is gorgeous but it's a usability nightmare and none of the post functionality works. Either the UX is broken for it and/or it force closes on a brand new (rom on my) Galaxy Nexus. You lose scroll position going between Activities, you can only view one page, etc.

It's true that I haven't used all of the apps for a long period of time. Hacker News Droid is the one I've been using the most, but sadly it hasn't stayed up to date compared with some of the competition. By the way, I just added Hacker News Android to the comparison. It is really beautiful and functional, and seems like a great choice if you're running ICS or above. It might also be slightly unstable though, and I had to log in before it would load the front page. Still, it's worth a look :)

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