news:yc (iPhone HN client) finally accepted into the App Store | Hacker News Reader

news:yc (iPhone HN client) finally accepted into the App Store

newsyc.me

220 pointsnews-yc117 comments

I've just happily paid for this app (congrats, nice app and makes my daily life easier/better)

I am always amused when people complain about paying $5 for an app like this.

Let's assume for a second that you are an IT/Internet professional, and you are read HN enough that you'd consider downloading an app. Maybe I am the exception, but I perhaps spend 30 mins per day on HN on my iphone. HN for me is great over breakfast, sitting on a train, lying in bed, taking a dump reading. The web experience on the iphone isn't great, and posting is hard, and lots of finger pinching. This makes that better.

Now lets do some rough maths. 30 mins per day, 365 days a year = a lot of hours (182.5 pa)

$5 = what an engineer earning US$100k for (220 days @ 8 hours/day earns in in 5 minutes (pre-tax). I've spent longer than that writing this post.

Obviously HN is international, salaries in some parts of the world are somewhat lower, but for those people in countries where iphones exist, and they own one, $5 is hardly that much.

The guy has even given away the source for free, if you would rather download it, and build it yourself.

For everyone that is so happy to pay $5 for this app, how about you leave a review on the app store. I saw this app before reading this article and was suspicious about paying $5 when there were 0 reviews... I think your praise would be better served on the app store? :)

$100k/yr in the USA? I guess if you're in Silicon Valley...

I make that much and I live about 2 hours away from a major market on the east coast. I haven't been offered a developer job anywhere in the past 5 years that was under 75k.

Silicon Valley not required to make $100K. LA, NY, DC, Chicago, Boston and probably more it is very doable to get $100K with several years under your belt.

Seattle too.

Look into salaries very carefully. This is not high or unusual or only in Silicon Valley. It's important to know what's typical. salary.com is not terrible for this, also try glassdoor.com.

Does that really affect the argument though? Does paying $5 for an app suddenly become the _wrong_ thing to do if you "only" earn $50k/yr so that $5 represents 10 whole minutes of work instead of 5?

I quite like the "here's the source, compile it yourself for "free" if you want" line... You can have my app for free, so long as you're already paying Apple $100/year... :-)

Agreed. I live in the southeast USA, and that kind of money for a developer is crazy talk. Our cost of living is a lot lower, though. All that aside, $5 for an app that truly is amazing, wouldn't be a stretch for me. heck, I bought Deliveries at full price the other day just to track a package.

From the page [emphasis mine]

> Why does news:yc cost $4.99? Isn't that too much for something already available online? Yes, it probably is. This is my first app in the App Store. I've never done this kind of pricing before, and I probably got it wrong. However, I do want to make sure anyone who wants to use news:yc can: feel free to build it from source or pirate it if you don't want to pay.

Love this. I really wish this candor was the rule, not the exception. I'm buying the app right away.

Actually, I think there'd be less bitching about the price if he removed the paragraph.

Many things that are sold can be had for free if you're willing to put in the effort, but it's a poor salesman who starts his pitch by saying "You really don't need to pay me".

I actually added that after most of the price discussion (which now seems to have been voted to the bottom of the thread). I would really like to be able to say "pay as much as you want", but unfortunately the App Store doesn't support that. Overall, my goal is not to make a ton of money here. I just want to make as much as people want to give me, with other ways to get it if I don't.

(Again, though, I'm new to this: I'll definitely take your advice for the future, if I do another "open source but paid" app.)

I wonder: would Apple allow you to submit a few different copies of the app, with different prices?

No. Not unless they had different feature sets.

They did at least once. I used to use an App called Zuginfo which was splitted into a normal free and a "Donation" version which was advertised to further development. (This app by an Indie was later killed by Deutsche Bahn.)

> I just want to make as much as people want to give me

The usual way to do this is to release the app for free and put a (PayPal) donate button on your page...

Maybe you could do this with in-app purchases. Make the app free and include different items that people can buy for different prices. I'm not sure what that items should be, but I'm sure you can figure out something.

Lol... Oh well, in that case, I guess I'll fall back on the trusted Reddit meme:

Haters will be hatin'.

Very true although I think in spirit with the general tune around HN it might make sense to say "Yes but pay $4.99 if you want me to sustain development" which I think is reasonable (and something I need to do more of).

People are complaining about $5? Really? Someone has put months of effort into this app, more than justifying the "high" price. If you think it's too expensive, just don't buy it.

I just bought it and think it's great (nice icon too).

Whether it's justified or not, it's about double the current market value for these kinds of apps in the iOS app store ecosystem. So yeah, people will complain, even though it's the amount of money you'd probably easily spend on a cup of coffee.

The reason people are complaining is not that people are not willing or not able to spend $5 on a HN reading app. The problem is that people simply aren't used to it.

$5 is what you pay for a game, for an app that piggybacks on someone else's content you usually either pay nothing or about a buck.

I wonder whether or not the author would make more money from it if the app was $2.50 or $1.

I'll gladly pay the $5 though.

I'm surprised that people are making this argument here on HN. Pricing has nothing to do with how many months a developer spent on an app. The consumer doesn't and shouldn't care about it anymore than a developer should care about how much effort someone took to earn and spend those five bucks.

FWIW, I think five dollars is ok for a niche app like this but "he spent a lot of time on it" doesn't sound like a legitimate justification for it (or for any pricing).

Why is that not a legitimate justification? The vast majority of the world's population charge a monetary fee for their time, so why is this any different? The guy put a lot of effort into making an app, as such, if you like the app, you now reward him for that time by paying him.

You have a good point. Only thing I can say is that products are typically priced on what the market for it will bear. That's why enterprise crud apps or office productivity apps may sell for more than a game which may have required more effort from more skilled people.

Suppose that it turns out that he had outsourced the development of the app - as long as you get the same app, should he charge less?

What if has still written it but was using a special compiler which compiled Lisp to Objective-C and had only spent two hours doing it, would you still feel that it was fair you paid the same?

Yes, it's only $5. A good cup of coffee is only slightly less than that, and it takes all of minutes to create. It's not like we are talking about $1000 enterprise software here.

People decide to buy things based on the value it has to them. The value it has to the producer is irrelevant. The right price is the one that will bring in the highest total revenue. If it's priced too high or too low then the producer is being deprived of his hard earned cash.

Failure to grasp this simple concept is costing some industries a lot of money right now.

Completely agree. I really don't get why some people complain about being charged any money for months of work. Do they expect it to be free? Reminds me of the ridiculous comments on the app store.

Were this in any other context - an inane weekend project, or faux start-up that is just a website - as we've seen a billion times before, people would spout the same mantras about charging from the start, hustling, going for it, and what not.

I don't know if people are making a fuzz because it's about Hacker News, or if they just don't believe the mantra they keep repeating, when they finally have put their money where their mouth is.

Charging for this app means the developer's time is valuable; releasing it for free would suggest that s/he does it to get a job. It also means that traction will let the developer improve the app over time to the benefit of people who subscribe to the idea.

I am perfectly open to a discussing on pricing it 2.99 instead of 4.99, but I can't be bothered by the outcries to make it free.

EDIT: I just saw that the developer even released the source code on GitHub. That's about as good as it can get.

Note: a complaint about price isn't a plea to make it free -- I wrote a longer response on another reply. It's opening a conversation about why the app deserves ____'s money

Both our arguments can be generalized to a straw man; I haven't read your specific comment, but I am sure we agree with each other. I am saying that people are being jerks, when they would have sung the developer's praises in another context, and you are saying that it's fine to ask a developer about why their product is desirable and worth someone's money.

It's fine to ask a person about what sets the app apart, and how it works, when they pay for it, and because it's fun to have a developer pitch their product, as is our wont on HN. What bothers me is the immense hypocrisy when people get downright hostile like this - like some do in this thread.

If the hostile people could get their head out of their ass, they could discuss the app on the basis of whether it was a sustainable business model - not an affront to their delicate, incongruous sensibilities.

I don't mind people not wanting to spend $5 on something if they don't [for whatever reason] feel it's worth it... but I sure don't care to see them whine about it, either.

The one thing I don't like is the icon!

Yup, people need to stop being cheap. Bought the app immediately after opening the link, and I probably would have at any price.

It's a well made app, good job. Do keep us posted on how the price point worked out for sales.

Here are some suggestions:

1. It would be great to have an option when opening an article to automatically apply Readability when it loads (maybe you can choose that option by long-touching the title of the article or something). This would reduce waiting time on reading the article.

2. An article queue would improve multitasking. If the user could select a bunch of articles and have them load in the background, that would be awesome.

3. A setting to show the full text of every comment in the list view of all comments. I don't want to have to click a comment to read it fully, and I don't have to do that on the HN website.

Good luck!

Reading the default HN website from my iPhone sucks (small voting arrows, table layout doesn't degrade gracefully to a small screen, etc.) I'm glad to see that you stepped up to the plate and solved a problem that many of us have experienced. I'm more than happy to shoot you $5 for your solution.

I do UI/UX work and would love to point out a few quirks I've noticed if you're interested. You can find my email in my profile.

By the way, releasing the source code was a classy move!

Niche product for niche audience therefore keep the price high, if you reduce to 0.99 you will have to sell 4 times as many. As the niche audience has had the source code made available to them they can compile it for themselves if they require!

Interesting thought - since this is released with a BSD style license [1], couldn't someone else theoretically submit it to the Apple store at a lower cost?

1: https://github.com/newsyc/newsyc/raw/HEAD/LICENSE

Would they accept it? Is there a clause that disallows something like that in the App Store TOS?

Yes, if they are an asshole.

Why would they be an asshole? The license is fairly explicit in permitting it.

What if someone were to improve the app significantly and then submit it?

Cheers. A tweetie-esque HN app is a great idea. I'll gladly put down $5 to help keep a promising high-schooler motivated and building cool stuff. Shame on you guys for trying to pressure him to change his price. And I like you're approach of "well it's $5 in the app store but here's the source if you want to build it, fork it, and/or install it yourself for free." Jason Fried would be proud of your pricing (ha!). Keep building. Good luck. #downloaded

And to follow up, really nice work. My favorite HN reader so far. Comments: - Would be nice to skip through the comments and go straight to the article - $4.99 is the right price. I spent $2.99 on the "offline HN reader" and another one and this makes me regret ever buying those others.

Again to the price-haters: $5 a pop to help keep a hs kid from flipping burgers or mowing lawns this summer and keep him doing something that matters (and something he's shown to be pretty kickass at so early in his life)? Worth it.

Bug report: sometimes the pull-down refresh element is overlain on the headlines. Not sure what could be causing it.

Yeah, I've seen that too. I really don't know what causes it, but I'm definitely going to investigate for the next release.

Well done, there's a lot other hackers can learn from this:

1. Release it - too many programmers have a half-baked idea, or end up with a half-baked implementation. They start out all fired up, but don't have the stamina to see the product released to market.

2. Building stuff is great for job hunting. I can almost guarantee that this guy will get an internship out of this. He clearly has two features in great demand: programming ability, and gets stuff done. This product is far more attractive than a resume full of IT buzzwords. As long as he's not a prick in the interview, he'll get hired.

3. Focus your product on a niche. This minimises the work needed to get to market, and makes it easy to position your product as number one in the eyes of your potential customer. I haven't installed this app, but I bet it is better - and seen to be better - than any other app for browsing Hacker News (Safari included).

4. Charge a price for your product. This is where the rubber meets the road, where you discover that software development is much more than programming. Ignore the people wanting it for free and cater to those willing to pay. Play around and see how price changes affect revenue. Even if you later decide to make it free, a product that goes from $5 to zero 'feels' like a better product than something that started out free - classic 'anchoring' psychology.

Thanks for making the source code available (https://github.com/newsyc/newsyc/)!

Congrats! You had similar logic to why I made an App specifically to read HN on the iPad. It's very odd that you initially had trouble getting it accepted, as mine didn't have an issue at all with the initial version. With more screen space on the iPad, I opted to leave mine free with an adbar. I'll probably provide iAP to remove the ads enough people end up interested in it.

(If you're interested, mine is at: http://itunes.apple.com/app/hacker-news-padreader/id42833141...)

There will always be people who think your app should be cheaper or free. How many of them will write their own app and sell it for less? How many will put in the same number of hours of work and give it away?

My message to them is to pay or don't pay, but stop with the whining masquerading as "advice." If someone has a strong opinion about why the author will make more money at a lower price, they should walk their talk and write their own damn software.

Points are currently prioritized over replies, which doesn't make a lot of sense given that points are private and you're not displaying the contents of a threaded comment in the root article display page. Seems like those two things (points and replies) should be switched, and more attention should be paid to letting the user know a comment has replies.

Good start though, I've been enjoying browsing HN on it since seeing the news go up.

Wish there were an iPad version of this... Hacker News HD crashes a lot on mine, and I'd be willing to pay $4.99 for a nice interface with cacheing.

Wow what a lot of complaining. App developers are free to charge what they want and users are free to purchase or not. You would think that the readers of a site as focused on entrepreneurs as HN is, would realize that.

Very few apps in the App Store are also available open source on Github. I'm buying it just because of that and I hope the developer keeps working on it.

I love the app and idea...but I log-on with my OpenId (Google email).

Does the app support me logging in like that? I remember it didn't when we looked at beta screenshots a few weeks/months back.

Looking great otherwise though!

As a high school student (well, graduate tomorrow!) who is interested in designing mobile applications, I would really be interested in reading about your experience building this app. Not only the design and code, but the release and launch, if you don't mind.

I just bought the app and it's great! Keep up the good work!

EDIT: Just one little quirk I've noticed. The comment test is really small (I'm visually impaired and already hold the phone a few inches from my face). While I can read it, could you give us an option to increase it at some point in the future?

I don't like it; I'll be sticking with Michael Grinich's "Hacker News", although it has plenty of faults too. In particular: * I don't like the threading. * I don't like the partial view of the comments.

Just bought it. Checking it out.

I want push notifications for replies, though :). Premium feature? Could make something to poll myself but I'm cool with spending a few monies for it.

+1 Push notifications for replies

Or even just an extra tab to see replies within the app would be much appreciated.

You should consider taking donations. It'd be a good way for people that can build it themselves to show their appreciation without having to give 30% to Apple.

Nice work - just installed it. I would sorta agree with everybody else and say lower the price - $1 or $2 is "dont even think about the price" range whereas atm seems most of the conversation is about the price being high

Edit: thanks for putting the code up. let us all know how this works out in terms of numbers etc. if you can

I can read HN on all mobile devices with a web browser. What value does a platform specific app provide?

The HN website works on a phone... but it's hardly where you would want to read it. If you are trying to read the comments, once you're zoomed out enough to see the whole width, the font is usually too tiny to read. And then, to vote on one, you have little tiny buttons that even at the max zoom levels are hard to tap (I've seen quite a few comments apologizing for tapping the wrong arrow on the iPhone).

Now, a platform-neutral website can do what news:yc does too: http://ihackernews.com/ is a good one. But, for the same reason that Twitter clients are popular, some people just like to have one that's built native for their platform.

Agreed, but HN could upgrade to html5 and do what nytimes did. Compare nytimes.com to nytimes.com/chrome (requires a web kit browser)

I have to say, that http://ihackernews.com/ is pretty snazy! I wonder why people dont just put a "home" icon button thing.

I would love a send to readability function (read later.) Other then that it's great! It's so nice when readability view is integrated into applications meant for reading things. Reeder did this and I love it—it's even more useful on the Reeder mac app.

There is a button for readability view when you are browsing a link. Click the R.

One thing that's a required feature for me is the "show more" feature.

I don't get to read enough and I only get bursts to consume and I need more than the default number of displayed links.

It's on the todo list for 1.1, the relevant issue is here[0] if you want to follow the progress.

[0]: https://github.com/newsyc/newsyc/issues/17

Fantastic. I do 90% of my hacker news reading from a mobile. Can't stress how worth $5 this app was for me. Nice job! And thanks also for releasing it under the free BSD license too.

Using it now. $5 well spent. Great job on this - very intuitive and clean. Very impressive at such a young age - you should have your pick of internship opportunities!

I'm using it right now and I like it a lot.

Instapaper integration is handy, but I'd like to be able to bookmark conversations, so I can go back and see new comments.

Live it. Posting from the app now in fact. Only suggestion so far is to include rotation support. Sort of a pain being portrait only, many people like landscape mode.

But please only with an option to fix it to portrait mode - iPods don't allow to lock the mode.

Will it support comment scores[1]? :D

[1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2568453

Has anyone used this app as well as Michael Grinich's app (I'm posting from that) and iHackerNews.com in Mobile Safari? Which do you prefer?

I just bought the app. The one I was previously using cost 2.99 and has many many issues, like not showing usernames of comments as well as once I've logged in to the app I can no longer see comment counts on the stories.

I'm still getting used to the differences between the way stories and commenting works but my initial impression is that I like it a lot more.

It does seem a lot faster more functional than Michael Grinich's app. I'm not sure I really like the 3 line comment previews and having no indication of how many replies a comment has. EDIT: it does show the number of replies, I don't know how I hadn't noticed.

I'm not sure if its true but one of the commenters said the creator is in high school. What resources did you use learning Objective C?

This is a really polished app. I've noticed a lot of the other hacker news readers in the app store lack features or have weird UI

Exactly what I was looking for. Nothing more, nothing less. Beautiful work. The readability add-on was an unexpected gem.

This is great. would totally pay for this. and I love love love that you put your source code up. Open source is so cool.

Love the app but I'm dying for sharing features in an HN app. Please add Facebook and Twitter support.

I only added the most basic sharing option — copying the link — for 1.0, since it works for everything. But, I'll definitely look into more sharing options for the future, Facebook and Twitter would probably be at the top of those lists.

I used this when it was in beta, and it's really really nice. I can't wait for iPad support!

Another one? I have 3 iPhone HN clients already.

What's your unique value proposition?

What's the best one in your opinion? I have been using an online one, but it's kind of rubbish!

I'm using the one from Michael Grinich. Simple and useful. I particularly like the integrated Readability function.

I used Grinich's app before the one this thread is about and I have to say this new one is much better: it also has readability and Instapaper support, so you won't miss that; it works a lot better: you can see user names on submissions and comments, and scores on submissions; and has more functionality: it has the new stories page, your profile, let's you submit, etc.

Feature request: full size comments (not short preview) and nested comments.

I'm glad they approved the app. I just bought it and it's fantastic.

I would have bought it if it were $1.99. Just a data point for you.

Well worth the money, loving the RIL support :)

how is it in comparison to the mobile web site

http://ihackernews.com/

Cool app, please honor newlines in quoted text

curious, how many downloads have you got so far?

Not for $5. Opera Mini gives me the same thing for free.

4.99 ????

A suggestion:

Have you seen the tweetbot app (http://tapbots.com/software/tweetbot/)? A recommended download. Swipe left, Swipe right on a tweet perform actions. This sort of thing is perfect for this app.

Swipe left: Comments

Swipe right: Article in browser

Double click article: Read Later in Instapaper

Great app, and congrats. First time I've taken the plunge on an iOS HN app, and not disappointed so far (a little afraid though, due to potential drop in productivity).

I was thinking about something similar to this, more like the swipe-for-options menu in Twitter for iPhone, and showing the same toolbar that you get on the details page.

I also really like the idea of double tapping -- maybe (instead of Instapaper) for the article directly, as a shortcut to avoid loading the comments if that's not what you want.

Swiping for options for voting on comments would be cleaner than tapping the comment and being taken to a separate screen for voting controls.

Nonetheless, the app is a great start. Glad to see it on the AppStore.

+1 for the double tapping directly to article shortcut.

I was simply suggesting that you can use those actions in the app and randomly assigned what they should do. I like the double tapping for the article directly idea a lot.

I think the details toolbar is more useful where it is since I generally don't flag or upvote an item unless I read it. But that is a great idea (the swipe-for-options). You can include adding to Instapaper, and perhaps twitter/facebook/email sharing.

Also, a small bug: All the comments on the submissions say 0 points.

ihackernews.com by HN'er ronnier works very well for reading HackerNews on a mobile, although it seems that voting has been borked recently due to some log on discrepancies. Why pg doesn't have a simple mobile version is mind boggling.

Free Vs. Paid (Iphone)HN Access? I dont think its fair for people to Poo-Poo on outcries of making it free. To be fair, HN now is freely accessible, and a part of me cringes at the notion of charging folks for an "iphone-wrapper" (pardon the term) to free HN community content.

Though, it is commendable that great effort has been put forth by the developer/mastermind of the app -- and certainly that should also be rewarded. (cool points for putting it on GitHub)

Perhaps, something in between? Tip Jar; or KickStarter or Ads? I dont know. It would be interesting to see what kind of revenue and overall reception the app and developer gets! (would love to see a 'post-launch' write up)

Requires iOS 4.0 or later. [edit: Is this untrue?]

No, it's true, but iOS 4 has been out for almost a year, and is available for almost all devices (and required on the iPhone 4 and newer). I think the downvotes might be because it's just not important information anymore, almost everyone is on iOS 4.0 or later.

I own an Android phone and I have a Hacker news App made by Ronnie Roller which is ad free.

Is this news-yc Iphone app in anyways different from the one I have installed as far as the features go? Just curious...

Also the ronnieroller Android app gets installed in phone harddrive instead of sdcard. Though it only takes uo 200KB, I cant move it for some reason, I dont really like that. There are other apps for HN on android market which I need to check.

5 bucks ??? What's the value-add? Also why is there no iPad version? (replying from an iPad btw)

The value is in an interface for HN that actually makes sense for an iPhone: no tiny voting arrows that don't work with fingers, no comment box that you need to scroll back and forth to see what you're typing, comments that fit the screen's width at a hopefully-readable font size.

Maybe it isn't worth five bucks, that's just where I decided to try out pricing to start. But I did try and make it as easy as possible to use if you don't want to pay: it's free if you build it yourself. (I even submitted it to the pirate sites so those without a dev certificate can install it too.)

Edit, iPad version: I am planning on making one, but Hacker News is usable as it is on the iPad in the browser, there's much less of an advantage for a native client.

As a defense (because the complaints about price are perceived as some intrinsic abhorrence to shell out money):

The price makes sense if there is some perceived added value that exceeds the price point. I am not afraid to spend money, but it needs to help me. For example, I spent money to buy issh because I found a need for using vnc on my phone.

It's nice to think that people should pay for your development time but that means nothing if you aren't providing any value.

So let's consider what makes HN (which is free in website form) inconvenient on iPhone in the first place:

1) typing very long responses and scrolling back. This is true, writing long responses on the iPhone is a pain because of the keyboard (which your app doesn't seem to solve) and because the iPhone text editor doesnt put scrollbars. That is true, but I genuinely wonder if people try to wrote really long responses on the iPhone, at least long enough to blow away the size of the box.

2) tiny arrows -- personally it's a nonissue for me because I would have to zoom in anyway to read the text. I could see how this is an issue for those who vote before reading the article.

3) Comments that fit the screen width -- I can appreciate the argument, given that you group conversations, but it's sometimes hard to see the full relationship between comments if you hide the sub replies. For example, some people reply to a comment of a comment with a new root comment, and that new comment doesn't make sense until you read the other tree.

I don't mean to be a negative Nancy it's always important to ask about the value add to the potential customers. And this is my opinion. Clearly others find value in your app. That being said, complaining about cost isn't s plea for a free app but rather is a query into how the author perceives the value-add of the application. And just to test, I wrote this on my 3GS

I'm an iOS developer, and I think $5 is a bit steep to simply try it out. I'm going to build from source and then buy it if I like it, but you may want to consider making some sort of free version that people could use to evaluate it.

  The value is in an interface for HN that actually makes
  sense for an iPhone:

The UI is making me think about making my own. Comments threads are not convenient to read.

The audience for this is ... us? I'm dismayed at the idea HN readers are voluntarily choosing this hostile platform for their own use, rather than merely holding their nose and developing for hapless consumers, while personally using a platform that likes hackers.

I pick my battles carefully. I think actually working on making ther platforms better will do much more than choosing not to use a platform out of principle.

e.x. I believe if RMS were able to make free software more approachable / competitive with commercial software that would do much more for his cause than inventing silly names for DRM and alienating people.

Not that RMS hasn't done excellent work in the past, he has. But his current approach is awful.

Charging $5 for HN app - that's giving back to the community? Don't think so. Quite much just for a different interface.

agreed. to the dev: make it free, man. with this app you should have no problem getting that internship you're looking for

How is making it free going to land him an internship?

Do you have any good reasons for lowering the price? Making it free seems like an absolutely crazy suggestion. Why would he? To appease entitled brats?

I don't agree that he should give the app for free. I'd like to pay to support his efforts but 5 bucks is simply too much for this app.

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