BetterNews vs think
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
BetterNews
A modern reader for Hacker News, offering enhanced features not found on the original site. It provides personalized feeds, keyword alerts, and a built-in reader with customizable themes and text sizes.
- Personalized Home feed
- Keyword alerts
- Built-in reader
- Customizable themes and text size
- Cross-device sync
- Search stories and comments
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BetterNews is a modern reader for Hacker News, with the features the site never gave you. WHAT YOU GET • Top, Time, and New feeds, plus the classic HN view • Threads with collapse rails, new-comment highlighting, and comment permalinks • Follow keywords and people, and get a personalized Home feed • Keyword alerts the moment a matching story lands • Daily email digests, on your schedule and timezone • Favorites, read-state, and preferences synced across all your devices • Search across stories, comments, and people • Direct messages with verified HN users • A built-in reader, light and dark themes, adjustable text size, and multiple typefaces Signing up is free and takes one tap. No passwords.
think
This news app offers a focused reading experience by presenting one story at a time, free from distractions like auto-playing media or infinite scrolling. Users can customize their news sources by selecting topics, publishers, or adding custom RSS feeds, with all data stored locally for privacy.
- One story at a time reading
- Customizable publisher selection
- Add custom RSS/Atom feeds
- Bookmark stories for later
- No account or tracking
- Offline data storage
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think renders news the way e-ink renders a page: soft greys, a serif headline, dithered photographs, nothing that blinks, auto-plays, or refreshes itself while you're looking at it. ONE STORY AT A TIME No infinite scroll, no feed to doomscroll through. Each story fills the screen — headline, photo, publisher, and a read-time estimate. Swipe up for the next one, swipe right (or tap) to open the full article in-app. When you've seen everything your topics have to offer, the feed says so and stops, instead of padding itself out with filler. PICK YOUR PUBLISHERS, SKIP THE ALGORITHM There's no engagement-driven ranking deciding what you see. Choose your topics, and think shows you a curated catalog of publishers behind them — 208 publishers across 32 topics at last count. Vote a story up or down to tune the mix, or mute a publisher outright. Want a source that isn't in the catalog? Paste any site's RSS or Atom feed URL and think adds it to your list. SAVE FOR LATER Bookmark anything you don't have time for now. Saved stories are grouped by topic and stay in your list until you clear them. NO ACCOUNT, NO TRACKING There's no sign-in and no user id. think has no analytics, advertising, or crash-reporting SDK, and no server of its own — it only talks to your chosen publishers' RSS feeds and their image hosts. Your topics, your publishers, your votes, and your saved stories live on your device only, and are deleted when you delete the app. Available in English and Vietnamese. Requires iOS 15 or later.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is ratings volume: BetterNews at 5 against think's 1. think's advantage is iOS requirement (15.0 vs 17.0). On price, rating, update cadence 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. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
On the App Store both sit at effectively the same score — 5.0 for BetterNews against 5.0 for think. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: BetterNews has 5 ratings behind it against 1, so its average is the more settled of the two.
BetterNews ships an update every 2 weeks, think fortnightly. The most recent releases landed on October 20, 2026 and October 11, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | BetterNews | think |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 5.0 (5 ratings) | 5.0 (1 ratings) |
| Number of ratings | 5 — better | 1 |
| Update frequency | Every 2 weeks — better | Fortnightly |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Free | Free |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, iPad, iPod — better |
| Requires iOS | 17.0 | 15.0 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 5 MB | 24 MB |
| Age rating | 12+ | 17+ |
| Developer | Steven Truong | Khanh Trinh Le Ba |
Customer experience
BetterNews
think
In-app purchases
BetterNews
No in-app purchases
think
No in-app purchases









