HACK for Hacker News YC Reader

No doubt this is the best HN app I’ve used but it doesn’t hold a candle to something like Apollo which I consider(ed) the gold standard for a link aggregator client. Tap targets are way too small, must but almost half of what the HIG recommends. I find it infuriating to try to tap the “…” or upvote button only to have it collapse the thread and rinse and repeat 3-10 times before it works. Reply notifications and logged in status in general is extremely buggy. I randomly get logged out so I’ll be browsing, go to upvote, and get a generic error. It’s at this point I’ll notice the “Downvote” option is missing but the app will still show me logged in. Sometimes the only fix is to kill the app and/or log out/in again. Similarly, clicking on the bell/notification icon will randomly tell me “You haven’t enabled reply notifications” which is a setting I’ve never toggled off, yet it gets toggled off on me without any action on my part. The app works well overall but interacting with posts and the inconsistent/buggy auth status drive me bonkers.

This app is the best app for hackernews that I’ve tried on iOS and I’ve tried a couple of them. It’s so good I paid for the pro version and it’s even better with the latest update. I really like all the settings/options. One suggestion I would have though would be adding a right swipe to go back to the previous page(basically the opposite of the left swipe). Apollo has this enabled by default. Another suggestion would be adding the ability to swipe away the long press options or hiding those options behind an overflow menu because I always find myself accidentally long pressing comments and bringing up the menu.

I continue to be impressed by this app. What started out as just a beautiful wrapper for HN has continued to evolve into easily one of the best experiences on iOS for consuming feeds, á la Apollo for Reddit. I have also had great success reaching out to the developer, as others mention. I recently noticed that there is a Share as Image feature, which is one of my biggest uses in Apollo - wow! Works great in HACK too! Easily worth the download and the purchase for premium. A+. Thanks Pranoy!