It's the 1st version of on-screen navigation so for sure there are rooms for improvement. I think of it as a D-pad, as in games, when you make selection with D-pad, down means selecting below item. I can make a toggle option to reverse scroll direction though.
I already did some optimization to load 1 extra page of comments in advance, which I believe should improve the experience. I also tried the same trick for stories but got some janky issues that I need to figure out first.
Swipe down the button should go to next same level comment, or if none it goes to the next one, which is the 1st child.
User-related content support is quite limited at the moment as I need to crawl HN web for that.
I have something similar in mind but haven't get started yet. It can be done via HN API, but it can only be done at regular interval (polling), as I don't use Firebase but raw web API.
I already have similar request in my backlog. This is gonna be tricky, because I don't have all comments up front as they are loaded on demand (even for saved comments - loaded on demand from cache).
1. I can't sync vote status so it's only a best effort at the moment to let you vote. Of course after the 1st vote is recorded subsequent votes will not count. This for sure can be improved.
2. Sure. I added vibration because I tend to mis-swipe so I added vibration to give me some feedback. But I understand not all users may like it.
Thanks! Would be helpful if you can share your device info so I can try to reproduce that issue. If you still keep the app around you can just send an in-app feedback and it will automatically include such info. Or you can reply here. Or if you can email me, my email should be available on Play Store listing.
No downvote is a known issue, partly because I can't test it, so I'm not confident I'll deliver a reliable feature.
I agree that upvote should be more visible. Currently it's available as an option tucked in popup menu, as well as via swipe gesture, which is not very discoverable.
3rd one is a feature called 'deep link' which is quite common in Android. It should remember your choice if you choose 'Remember my choice'. I don't know what went wrong here as it is a platform feature and out of my control :(
Disable card view (which is the default for new installations) + choose smaller text size would achieve more or less the same. I have already gone thru few iterations of compacting the UI and I'm afraid I can't squeeze it anymore :(
You're correct. Saved/bookmarked stories have been there way before HN has favorite. I'm thinking of syncing these two, but it's not very straightforward without API support.
It's because stories/comments are loaded on demand. If you never scroll to it it won't be loaded. It was designed this way partly due to how HN API works, which doesn't provide all data up front.
Alternatively app can aggressively load everything up front, which is slow; or paginate content. To me it tends to feel faster when u have progressive UI change (empty card then fill it) than abrupt change (completely empty then all items appear), so I decided not to paginate.