Show HN Got More Than Three Times Busier in Three Years. iOS and Android Launches Roughly Kept Pace With It

Two earlier posts counted the jobs side of Hacker News. Mentions of iOS and Android in the monthly hiring threads fell by about two thirds, and the number of job seekers per hiring post rose five to six times for native mobile. The obvious follow-up question is whether people also stopped building mobile apps. The third thing HN can show is what gets launched. "Show HN" is where makers post what they built, so I counted titles with the same method.

The short answer: mobile launches did not fall. Show HN itself grew so much that iOS and Android launches grew with it.

What the counts say

Show HN stories whose title contains each word, averaged per 30 days so that half-years of different length compare. 2026 H2 covers 1 July to 29 October, 120 days.

Period	All Show HN	iOS	Android	AI	Claude
2023 H1	1,161	10.6	5.3	145	0.5
2023 H2	1,153	10.8	6.8	158	1.3
2024 H1	1,353	11.0	5.8	191	4.1
2024 H2	1,534	8.8	3.9	240	11.2
2025 H1	2,063	18.9	8.5	383	21.0
2025 H2	2,581	21.5	10.4	484	60.8
2026 H1	4,303	36.5	25.9	888	219.6
2026 H2	3,896	29.0	24.8	610	163.2

And the same data as a share of all Show HN titles:

Period	iOS	Android	React Native	Flutter	AI	Claude
2023 H1	0.91%	0.46%	0.11%	0.20%	12.5%	0.04%
2023 H2	0.93%	0.59%	0.16%	0.21%	13.7%	0.11%
2024 H1	0.82%	0.43%	0.11%	0.15%	14.1%	0.30%
2024 H2	0.57%	0.26%	0.18%	0.16%	15.7%	0.73%
2025 H1	0.92%	0.41%	0.07%	0.10%	18.6%	1.02%
2025 H2	0.83%	0.40%	0.08%	0.04%	18.8%	2.36%
2026 H1	0.85%	0.60%	0.07%	0.08%	20.6%	5.10%
2026 H2	0.74%	0.64%	0.06%	0.06%	15.7%	4.19%

Four readings.

The board got much busier. Show HN went from about 1,160 stories per 30 days in early 2023 to 3,900 to 4,300 in 2026, a factor of 3.4 to 3.7. I did not look into why. More makers, more automated submissions and cheaper building could all do this, and the counts cannot tell them apart.

iOS and Android launches roughly kept pace. iOS titles went from 10.6 to 29.0 per 30 days, Android from 5.3 to 24.8. As a share of the board, iOS slipped from 0.91% to 0.74% and Android rose from 0.46% to 0.64%. In absolute terms there are about three times more iOS launch titles per 30 days than in early 2023 and about five times more Android ones. The hiring side moved in the opposite direction over the same period, as the first post showed.

React Native and Flutter did not ride the wave. Their title counts stayed at roughly 7 to 20 per half-year while the board grew 3.7 times. Flutter's share fell by more than half and React Native's by about a third to a half, on counts too small to lean on. Titles say little about what is under the hood, so I would not read this as a framework ranking.

AI reached about a fifth of the titles, and Claude went from a handful of titles to thousands. "AI" went from 12.5% to 20.6% of titles in the first half of 2026 and 15.7% so far in the second half. "Claude" went from 3 titles in the first half of 2023 to 1,325 in the first half of 2026. The two overlap, so their shares cannot be added.

What this does and does not say

A launch is not a job. A lot of Show HN is side projects, open-source tools and one-person products, so more mobile launches does not mean more mobile employers. What the three posts show together is a split: the number of mobile launch titles is up, the number of companies posting roles for native mobile engineers is down. I did not test why, and I will not guess in a data post. One hypothesis I would check next is whether the launch count grows faster than the number of distinct makers, because a single person can now ship more titles.

Limits

• Counts are exact-word matches in the title of stories tagged show_hn, from the HN Algolia API, retrieved 2026-10-29. Stories that Algolia does not index, such as removed ones, are not counted.
• A title that names two terms counts for each, so the columns overlap and must not be added.
• Word matching is on whole words with no prefix matching. My first run used the default prefix matching, which also matches longer words that begin with the search term, and it inflated the AI count by about 4%. Switching it off moved the first-half 2023 AI count from 911 to 874, and the numbers here use the stricter match.
• Only titles are searched. An iOS app whose title says "Show HN: A habit tracker" is not counted.
• 2026 H2 has four months of data and uses a per-30-day rate. Short windows move more.
• "Claude" and "AI" are matched as words and I did not read the titles one by one, so some matches may use the word in another sense.
• I did not check how many Show HN stories are written or posted by automation.

Method

import json, urllib.request, urllib.parse, time, datetime
B = 'https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?'

def get(u):
    for _ in range(6):
        try: return json.load(urllib.request.urlopen(u, timeout=40))
        except Exception: time.sleep(3)
    raise SystemExit('fail ' + u)

def count(word, lo, hi):
    p = {'tags': 'show_hn', 'hitsPerPage': 0,
         'numericFilters': f'created_at_i>={lo},created_at_i<{hi}'}
    if word:
        p.update({'query': word, 'restrictSearchableAttributes': 'title',
                  'typoTolerance': 'false', 'queryType': 'prefixNone'})
    return get(B + urllib.parse.urlencode(p))['nbHits']

def ts(y, m):
    return int(datetime.datetime(y, m, 1, tzinfo=datetime.timezone.utc).timestamp())

WORDS = {'all': '', 'iOS': 'iOS', 'Android': 'Android', 'React Native': '"React Native"',
         'Flutter': 'Flutter', 'AI': 'AI', 'Claude': 'Claude'}
for y in (2023, 2024, 2025, 2026):
    for a, b in ((1, 7), (7, 13)):
        lo, hi = ts(y, a), (ts(y, b) if b < 13 else ts(y + 1, 1))
        if lo > time.time(): continue
        hi = min(hi, int(time.time()))
        print(y, a, {k: count(w, lo, hi) for k, w in WORDS.items()})

Divide by the number of days in the window and multiply by 30 to get the per-30-day rate in the first table.

What I take from it

If you build and ship mobile apps, HN says you are in good company: more mobile launch titles appear every month than in 2023. If you are looking for a salaried mobile role, the hiring threads say there are fewer of them and more people competing. Both can be true at once, and the second one is the one I keep tracking for this series.

What I did not measure: downloads, revenue, retention or anything outside HN. Does the split between more mobile launches and fewer mobile roles match what you see around you?