On June 20, 2026, a developer named DatanoiseTV released Ember, a new way to read Hacker News on iPhone. What makes it unusual is what it does not include: Ember has zero outside code libraries built in.

Most apps, even simple ones, rely on code written by other developers to handle common tasks—things like fetching data from the internet, arranging text and images on screen, or storing information locally. These borrowed pieces of code, called dependencies, save time and reduce the amount of writing developers have to do. Ember skips all of that. Everything is built using Apple's own tools and frameworks, which come with every iPhone.

Why does that matter? For developers reading the code, it is much cleaner. There are fewer moving parts to understand, and no external code to download or verify before the app can even compile—the technical term for turning written code into a working program. Fewer pieces also mean fewer potential security problems hiding in other people's code.

The app itself focuses on reading Hacker News discussions. On a phone, showing threaded comment chains—those nested conversations where one reply leads to another, indented further and further—is surprisingly tricky to get right. You have to handle collapse buttons, track who wrote what, manage indentation levels, and make links tappable. Ember builds all of this using SwiftUI, Apple's modern way of designing iOS interfaces. Not using someone else's ready-made solution for showing nested threads is a deliberate constraint, but it also makes the project a solid example for other developers learning how to solve the same problem.

The project takes accessibility seriously from the start. This means it works well with tools like VoiceOver, which reads the screen aloud for people who are blind or have low vision, and Dynamic Type, which lets users enlarge text. Hacker News's own website is functional but minimal—it was not built with these needs in mind. A native iPhone app that supports them covers important ground the standard experience skips.

You can view and download the full code at github.com/DatanoiseTV/ember-hackernews. As of now, the app has not been released on the App Store, so it is mainly available to developers who want to build it themselves.

There is one practical tradeoff worth noting. SwiftUI, the framework Ember uses, has historically been less smooth than older iPhone tools when displaying very long lists or deeply nested content—like a Hacker News thread with hundreds of comments. Apple has improved this over the years, but whether Ember runs smoothly with a massive, tangled discussion thread is something you would only know by testing it, not just by reading the code.

Over the past fifteen years or so, many developers have built their own Hacker News readers for iPhone. The pattern that emerges is consistent: developers tend to build tools that match how they personally use the community, rather than trying to recreate everything the website does. Ember fits that pattern. It prioritizes making text easy and comfortable to read, and it makes sure accessibility works, rather than chasing feature-for-feature parity with the web version.

For iPhone developers who want to study a straightforward, self-contained SwiftUI project, Ember is a practical place to start.