Minimal Hacker News. No ads, no login, just the stories.

Plain Hacker News is a minimal, fast reader built natively for Android. Browse Top, New, Ask, Show and Jobs in a clean, no-nonsense interface, with keyword alerts and a home screen widget for the stories that matter.

Get it on Google Play

Free · Android · Unofficial client

The Top stories feed in dark theme, with Top, New, Ask, Show and Jobs tabs, and points and comment counts under each title

Read discussions without the noise.

Replies don't pile up into a staircase of indentation. Tap a commenter's name, or "Show 8 replies", and that comment opens on its own screen with its replies underneath.

Go deeper and it opens another. Back takes you up one level. Smart caching keeps stories loading fast.

A story page with its top-level comments, each showing a Show replies link

A comment thread screen with the original comment on top and replies below it

Get alerts only for the topics you actually care about.

Set alerts for topics, tools or companies, like rust, kubernetes or layoff. You're notified only when matching stories hit the front page. Pick a minimum score, from any to 250+, to skip the quiet ones.

Matching runs entirely on your device. It ignores case unless you turn that on, and can be limited to whole words.

412 Upvotes 86 Comments Matched: rust

The Add Keyword screen with a keyword field, minimum points chips for Any, 50+, 100+ and 250+, and case sensitive and whole word switches

Find any story instantly with fast, focused search.

Powerful Algolia search finds stories as you type, with your words highlighted in every result.

Read history keeps track of what you've already seen. Opened stories fade out in the feed and in search, and you can switch it off or clear it in Settings.

Search results for the word claude, with the word highlighted in each story title

The small print

Price: Free, with no ads.
Account: No sign-in required. You can't log in, vote or post; it's a reader.
Theme: Light and dark mode that follows your system theme, or pick one in Settings.
Built: Natively for Android with Kotlin and Jetpack Compose. It only talks to the official Hacker News and Algolia APIs.
Your data: Keyword matching runs on your device, and read history and keywords stay there. Anonymous usage data helps us improve stability and performance; the privacy policy lists exactly what.
Links: Use Android's Share menu to send any Hacker News link to the app and read it there.
Affiliation: Unofficial and not affiliated with Y Combinator.

From the blog

Oct 11, 2026

Welcome to Plain Hacker News

Why we built a quieter Hacker News client, and what makes it different.

Just the stories that matter, minus the noise.

Plain Hacker News is free on Google Play.