I’ve always wanted a news app designed for people who don’t stay up-to-date daily. That pays attention to when I check-in and what stories I’m aware of and adapts to me. You see, I’m not a good “follower” of the news, and I “catch-up” fairly infrequently. When I do, I want to see the most important things I’ve missed in the meantime, not today’s top stories. I’d like to emerge from my metaphorical cave after a week, a month, or longer, and quickly see what I missed.

That’s Old News. I built it for myself, but if you’re like me (statistically, you probably aren’t!) you may like it too. It is quite simple. Swipe to see recommended Hacker News stories and the app keeps track of what you’ve seen. When you come back you’ll see the top stories you haven’t seen yet, with a slow exponential decay of the score over time (a big story from yesterday is still more interesting than one from last month). In the future, I’d love to explore making that decay rate user-configurable so that you can decide how much you prefer newer vs. older news.

Interesting for discussion, the app truly does get more useful the less you use it. If you check Hacker News daily, this probably won’t be useful at all! If you are like me, though, value per time used is super high. I’m really keen on this as a concept, and I think it’s worth more developers exploring it. Sure, it’s not great for “engagement” numbers, but I suspect there is a big latent demand for software that actively encourages us to use it less.

Download Old News here: https://oldnews.mitchcrowe.com

Caveats: - iPhone only (sorry!) - Probably missing features you consider “essential” for a news app (I like simple!) - No business model, just free hobby software