Octal for Hacker News vs Hacker News Tech Reader
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Octal for Hacker News
Access breaking tech news and engage in discussions with a beautifully designed, fast, and user-friendly feed. Vote on stories, submit posts, comment, and manage favorites without ads or subscriptions.
- Vote on stories and comments
- Submit new posts
- Engage in threaded discussions
- Search Hacker News stories
- Manage favorites
- Customizable news feed filters
- Dark Mode support
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Octal is your go-to news feed for breaking tech news, putting the biggest stories of the day with engaging discussion right in the palm of your hand. Beautifully designed for both iPhone and iPad, Octal focuses on what you care most about: native design, speed, and usability. It's the modern, full-featured Hacker News app you've been looking for. You'll find an unparalleled, community-powered source of stories about anything ranging from self-driving cars to the latest Apple gadgets. Octal has all the features you need, including the ability to vote on stories, submit posts, add comments, and manage favorites. Best of all, it's free of all that annoying stuff, like ads, subscriptions, and tracking. If you want to keep up to date with the latest popular and trending tech headlines, Octal is made for you. • NEWS FOR NERDS: Read and share the most important stories in the tech world, submitted and voted on by Hacker News users. Stories are constantly changing, and often focus on areas like programming, startups, technology industry and companies (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Uber, etc.), and key technology categories such as mobile, computers, internet, design, coding, and security. • ENGAGE AND VOTE: Vote on stories and comments you like and dislike, and report stories with objectionable content. Found something you need to read later? Add it to your favorites! • DISCUSS THE NEWS: Read and engage with stories by viewing their discussions with a fast, fully-threaded, collapsible, buttery smooth comments experience. Add your own comments. If you're a fast reader, you can instantly jump to the next top-level comment thread with a single tap. • SUBMIT LINKS: Got a cool story or news link to share to Hacker News? Submit new posts directly in the app. You can also share links directly to Octal to quickly submit them. • SEARCH STORIES: Search Hacker News stories and sort search results by relevance or date. • JOIN THE COMMUNITY: Log in to Hacker News to easily track your karma, activity and favorites. Browse user profiles, including their karma, about, activity, and favorites. • THEMEABLE: Total Dark Mode support. Turn on 'True Black' to use a pure RGB #000 background color - perfect for devices with OLED displays. • CUSTOMIZE YOUR NEWS FEED: Tap or swipe between story feeds such as 'Top Stories', 'Threads', 'Ask HN', 'Show HN', 'Best Stories', 'New Stories', and 'Jobs'. • ACCESSIBLE: Increase or decrease the text size to one that's comfortable for you, or enable 'Dynamic Type' to use the system's 'Larger Text' font size. And VoiceOver is fully supported! • DEEP LINK SUPPORT: You can open Hacker News links in Octal by sharing them to Octal. You can also use apps like 'Opener'. Most Hacker News links starting with 'octal://' are supported! • READY FOR ANY SCREEN: Octal looks great on iPads with an optional 2-pane interface. Say goodbye to wasted screen real estate. • WEB BROWSER SUPPORT: Open links in your web browser of choice. • AD-FREE, PRIVACY AWARE: No ads, no subscriptions, and no tracking. ABOUT OCTAL PREMIUM: To unlock advanced features, including the ability to submit posts, add comments, manage favorites, switch themes, change app icons, use custom gestures, and more, you can buy Octal Premium via an In-App Purchase. Octal Premium is a one-time payment and there is no subscription. Purchases support the development of Octal, which is developed solely by me! ABOUT HACKER NEWS: Hacker News is a social news website focusing on computer science and entrepreneurship. It is run by Paul Graham's investment fund and startup incubator, Y Combinator. In general, its content can be submitted is defined as "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity". You can think of Hacker News as reddit for tech. It's the go-to news aggregator for tech. SUPPORT: Found a bug or have a feature request? Create an Issue on Github, or e-mail me: https://github.com/dangwu/Octal/issues
Hacker News Tech Reader
This app offers a streamlined and visually appealing way to access the latest tech, startup, and STEM news from Hacker News. It features push notifications, nested comment threads, and extensive customization options for a personalized reading experience.
- Ad-free and subscription-free experience
- Push notifications for replies
- Nested comment threads with collapse/expand
- Swipe gestures for upvoting and favoriting
- Powerful search with Algolia API
- Customizable themes, fonts, and layout
- Support for multiple third-party browsers
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HACK for YC's Hacker News is the most beautiful and easy way to read about the latest tech, startup and STEM news. - No Ads. No subscriptions. - Login or Register your Hacker News account - PUSH NOTIFICATIONS for Hacker News replies to comment or post - Supported on iPhone, iPad, and Mac - Setting to block AI posts on HN. - Comments are presented in nested threads - Tap a comment to collapse that thread - Swipe left or right on stories and comments to upvote and favorite - Ability to submit new posts including drafts - Long press a story, link or comment to share - iPad supports split view - On iPads, you can drag a story / comment / story's image (link) to open it in safari in split view. This is useful for when you are viewing the app in split view / multitasking and like opening the link / story / comment in a browser side by side. - Landscape and Portrait support - 3D touch for peek, pop support - Home screen 3D touch shortcuts - Hide posts from the feed - Tap the bottom button to scroll to the next root comment in the thread. Long press it to go to the previous one - All known hacker news endpoints - News, front page, Ask HN, Show HN, Show HN Newest, classic, active, best stories, best comments, new stories, new comments, noob stories, noob comments, jobs, over 100-500 points - Submit posts, reply, comment using your HN account - Browse top 100 leader accounts - Browse stories from a specific site, user or date - Search in comments and usernames! Search is case and diacritic insensitive and ignores punctuations. Search uses an CONTAINS, OR operation if multiple words are typed. - Can select / highlight the comment/post title text for lookup/copy/translate etc iOS native operations. - Powerful search (powered by Algolia API) - use @date to sort by date, #story to filter for stories, #comments to filter for comments, #author_username to filter by user etc. These tags can be separated by commas. Refer to https://hn.algolia.com/api for more tags. - Dark mode - both pure black and gray mode - Low contrast text mode to make the text not be pure white - Many color choices & color picker for customization - App icons in variety of colours for light and dark mode - Font choices - Ability to change font sizes, padding etc to make the layout as compact as you like! - Threaded comments with color bar to maintain visual orientation - Articles open in Safari view with setting to automatically open in "readability" mode - Tap the domain in a story to see all stories from that site - Tap the username in a story or comment to go to the user profile - Browse your submitted stories and comments, favorited stories and comments, upvoted stories and comments - Archive: View an archive of the post website. archive.is, archive.org & google cache. - Share comment as image - Articles can be opened in built in safari or 3rd party browsers. Supports Brave, Firefox, Firefox Focus, Orion, Opera Touch, Dolphin, DuckDuckGo, iCab Mobile, Microsoft Edge and Chrome. Go to settings > Disable the "Use in-app Safari" setting > tap that row to change the default browser. All stories and comments are via Algolia API and Hacker News API: https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://hn.algolia.com/api https://github.com/HackerNews/API Profile picture robots lovingly delivered by Robohash.org There are ongoing costs of developing and maintaining HACK. I am a small indie developer and need your help keep the lights on. I offer a beautiful app for the absolute best user-experience. I don't use intrusive ads, trackers, third-party analytics, subscriptions, or other nonsense. I need to run my own server for caching high quality favicons shown in the app plus for push notifications for replies to hacker news posts. If you can afford it, please support me by purchasing the one-time-only in-app-purchase or giving me a tip. No subscriptions. It's a small and fair amount which helps cover development costs of future updates. Contact me at: pran@pranapps.com
Screenshots
Verdict
Octal for Hacker News and Hacker News Tech Reader both sit at 4.8 stars, but that hides the real split: 94% of Hacker News Tech Reader's written reviews are positive against 74% of Octal for Hacker News's. Hacker News Tech Reader also leads on update cadence (every 3 days vs every 11 days) and device support (4 vs 2). On price, rating, ratings volume and ads there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Octal for Hacker News sells 4 one-off in-app purchases and Hacker News Tech Reader sells 6 one-off in-app purchases. Whichever you choose, the download price is not the number that matters.
On the App Store both sit at effectively the same score — 4.8 for Octal for Hacker News against 4.7 for Hacker News Tech Reader. Both are backed by a comparable volume of ratings — 2.9K and 1.6K respectively. Written reviews are what separate them: 74% of Octal for Hacker News's written reviews are positive against 94% of Hacker News Tech Reader's.
Octal for Hacker News ships an update every 11 days, Hacker News Tech Reader every 3 days. Both last shipped on November 11, 2026.
| Parameter | Octal for Hacker News | Hacker News Tech Reader |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.8 (2.9K ratings) — better | 4.7 (1.6K ratings) |
| Positive reviews | 74.0% of reviews | 93.6% of reviews — better |
| Number of ratings | 2.9K — better | 1.6K |
| Update frequency | Every 11 days | Every 3 days — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | Yes |
| Monetization | Free | Free |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, iPad, iPod, Mac — better |
| Requires iOS | 18.0 | 15.0 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 8 MB | 28 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 9+ |
| Developer | Daniel Wu | Pranoy Chowdhury |
Customer experience
Octal for Hacker News
Hacker News Tech Reader
Bugs and requests
Octal for Hacker News
Reported bugs
8 issues- Login and likes broken on iOS 16.0
- Restore purchase not working
- App icon doesn't change
- Editing a comment works but gives an error
- Can't collapse comments
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- Upvoting fails very often
- Refreshing comments doesn't load new comments
- Messes up Screen time
Requested features
18 requests- Dark mode option
- Ability to browse history and upvoted stories
- Markdown highlighting for comments
- Ability to select text when tap anywhere to collapse comment is enabled
- Downvote functionality
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- Ability to export bookmarks/favorites
- Swipe to collapse whole comment branch
- Larger upvote button
- Ability to see points on own comments
- Swipe to go back
- Paginated behavior instead of infinite scrolling
- Ability to filter by post types (Show HN, Ask HN, etc.)
- Linking back to upvoted comments
- Auto night mode
- Larger font size options
- Ability to see read news in grey
- Telegram Night Blue color scheme for dark mode
- Bookmark/offline support
Hacker News Tech Reader
Not enough reviews yet to summarise bugs or requests.
In-app purchases
Octal for Hacker News
- Kind Tip$1.99
- Generous Tip$4.99
- Premium$5.99
Show 1 moreShow fewer
- Extraordinary Tip$9.99
Hacker News Tech Reader
- Nice Tip$3.99
- Kind Tip$6.99
- Generous Tip$9.99
Show 3 moreShow fewer
- Amazing Tip$12.99
- Hack Premium$17.99
- Godzilla Tip$19.99
Questions
Is Octal for Hacker News free?
Is Hacker News Tech Reader free?
Which has better reviews, Octal for Hacker News or Hacker News Tech Reader?
Do Octal for Hacker News or Hacker News Tech Reader have ads?
Which is updated more often, Octal for Hacker News or Hacker News Tech Reader?
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