Seventeen themes. Thirty custom app icons. Threaded comments that actually thread. The native iOS reader for HN, built by one developer for people who treat the orange site like a daily ritual instead of a feed.
The premise
Hacker News is great. The orange website it lives on… is fine. HackerWire is the iOS reader it deserves — fast, native, themeable, and built like someone actually cared about the comments. No feeds to doom-scroll. No notifications begging for attention. No splash, no nag, no "what's new" modal. Just stories, comments, and an app you'll want to open every morning.
Appearance Warm paper. Cool paper. Solarized. Sepia. Newsprint. Pure Black for your OLED battery. Vaporwave for the poster you used to be. Six Colors Glitch if you remember the original iMacs. Pick a theme and the whole app obeys — chrome, comments, syntax highlighting in code blocks, every 1-pixel divider, the lot.
Identity Thirty custom app icons. Curated favorites. A YC Pack of vintage Y Combinator artwork. A Realism series of painterly scenes. Match the rest of your home screen, or rotate them like a wardrobe.
Reading Depth lines you can follow at any level. Collapse a branch with one tap. Reply arrows jump you straight to the parent. Long threads stop trapping you fifteen levels deep. The whole UI is built around the discussion, because that's why you're here.
Performance Stories open instantly. Scrolling stays at 120 Hz on ProMotion. No browser hiding in the basement. The app opens to top stories — that's the homepage. Nothing else.
On-device Tap once for a summary of the article or the full discussion. Generated entirely on-device by Apple Intelligence — private, free, and offline-capable; nothing is sent to a server. Generated only when you tap, never in a feed, and cached locally. Requires a recent iPhone with Apple Intelligence.
Keep Save a story and its full discussion for the flight, the subway, the airport with no signal. Bookmarks sync via iCloud across your devices. A week of saved articles stays available offline — typography intact, threading intact.
Craft Swipe left to upvote, right to bookmark. Pull-to-refresh with a haptic that feels like a real thing. Long-press any link for a preview. Dynamic Type everywhere. VoiceOver throughout. Keyboard shortcuts on iPad.
One price, everything in
No subscription. No upsells. No "Pro" tier hiding features behind a paywall. One small one-time purchase on the App Store and you get the whole thing — sign in, vote, comment, submit, bookmark, all seventeen themes, every app icon, offline reading, and on-device AI summaries. It supports a one-person operation that doesn't have a roadmap committee.
