Back to Mobile Development
Since leaving TC in 2023, where I worked as Mobile Lead, I’ve been entirely focused on Quarto à Vista — and with that, I ended up stepping away from mobile development for almost 3 years. An industry that, as we know, evolves very quickly.
Recently, some internal projects at Qavi started requiring mobile applications. We decided to adopt React Native with Expo, and I decided to use this opportunity to reenter the mobile world with a personal project.
I wanted to do the entire process from scratch — from design to development, including landing page, copy, app store publishing, and everything else.
The Project
Hacker Reader is a native Hacker News reader for iOS — Y Combinator’s forum known for gathering the main discussions about technology and entrepreneurship. Essential reading for anyone in the startup world.
I sought to leverage iOS-native features to the fullest to create a truly polished experience:
- Liquid Glass — modern and fluid visual effects
- Link Previews — rich link visualization with Open Graph
- Context Menus — native contextual menus for quick interactions
- Native Tabs — tab navigation following iOS standards
- Home Screen Widgets — widgets in three sizes displaying Top Stories with automatic updates
Tech Stack
The project is a complete monorepo that includes:
- Mobile App: Expo SDK 54 + React Native 0.81 with React Compiler
- Web: Next.js 15 App Router for landing page and marketing
- Features: Hacker News authentication, voting, favorites, comments, API search, and persistent bookmarks
- iOS Widgets: Three sizes (small/medium/large) with deep linking and offline support
Everything in TypeScript, React Query for state management, Expo router for navigation and Expo UI for some native interfaces.
Open Source
The app is completely open source under the MIT license. You can explore all the code, architecture, and technical decisions in the repository.
Links:
If you download the app, let me know what you think — and leave your review on the App Store! 🙏
Android coming soon…