Ask HN: Why there is no official mobile version of HN?
All the versions I am able to find are hobby projects.
7 comments
Not completely sure. Reddit for example has a few really good ones. Alien Blue for iOS and Reddit Is Fun for Android are the ones that come to mind. Might be that the HN community is too small with a comparatively low opportunity for real growth. It's big, but not compared to something like Reddit. To put in the work building and maintaining a product good enough to actually use, you'd want the developer to be making enough money such that he/she would be able/willing to support it. And that may be difficult with a community like HN.
If I had to guess, I would guess because PG and YC does not want to allocate too much resources to building it out as well as YC. They still add features, but I think I read somewhere before that every resource they spend on developing HN is resource and time that could be spent doing something else (opportunity cost). So they probably do the minimum needed and maybe a few features here and there from time to time and scaling fixes but overall probably not going to push huge changes. It's basically Craigslist.
It would be good to be able to search on mobile (with the search box on the bottom), but you can't hit Enter and have to go over to hnsearch. Unless there is another way?
Does anyone know if it's possible to pass a custom css to Hacker News?
Is there a need for one? It works fine on my phone as-is.
With lots of pinch-and-zoom.
I dunno, but Mouin HN is great for iOS.
is there an API to hackernews ?
there is one (unofficial) @ http://api.ihackernews.com/ which is used by ihackernews ... my mobile frontend of choice as long as there's no official one.
Thanks for pointing ihackernews out, I missed it on my searchs. Quite handy.
I think some unofficial ones.