A Clean, Simple Hacker News App Built Without External Libraries

A developer known as DatanoiseTV released Ember on June 20, 2026 — a Hacker News reader for iPhone built using SwiftUI, Apple's modern framework for designing iOS apps. The project uses zero external libraries.

That last constraint is the key design decision. Most iPhone apps, even fairly simple ones, pull in a few helper libraries — perhaps one to handle networking, another for layouts, maybe a third for caching data. Ember avoids all of that. It builds only on tools Apple provides natively. This approach keeps the codebase lean, removes the risk of relying on third-party code that could change or become outdated, and means there are no external packages to fetch before the app compiles. For anyone reading through the code or using it as a learning resource, that simplicity matters.

The app renders discussion threads from Hacker News in a native way, with careful attention to typography that prioritizes reading comfort over cramming as much information as possible onto the screen. Threading — the way comments nest and stack hierarchically — is trickier to build on iPhone than it looks. Managing indentation levels, collapsed/expanded states, author names, and links all interact in complex ways. Ember does this work entirely in SwiftUI, without reaching for workarounds or borrowed code from other developers. That makes the project a solid reference for anyone wrestling with similar tree-like layouts.

The documentation makes clear that accessibility is built in from the start, not bolted on afterward. This matters because Hacker News's own website is minimal — it works, but it wasn't designed with screen readers or text size customization in mind. A native app that takes those features seriously from the ground up fills a gap.

The project is open on GitHub at github.com/DatanoiseTV/ember-hackernews. As of now, it has not been released on the App Store, so it remains accessible only to developers who compile it themselves.

There is a real tradeoff worth understanding. SwiftUI's ability to smoothly display large, deeply nested lists — exactly what you get in a busy Hacker News thread with hundreds of replies — has historically lagged behind older frameworks Apple offered. Apple has improved this over recent software releases, narrowing the gap. Whether Ember performs well when rendering a 500-comment thread is something you cannot know from reading the code alone; you would need to run it.

The broader context is that iOS developers have maintained a steady appetite for clean, minimal Hacker News clients for more than a decade. Developers who use a community themselves tend to build tools that reflect their own needs rather than trying to replicate every feature of the official website. Ember follows that pattern: it prioritizes readability and accessibility over trying to do everything.

For iOS engineers interested in studying a tight, self-contained SwiftUI project or building on top of it, the no-dependency approach and public source code make Ember an approachable starting point.