Show HN: Particle - News, Organized
27 comments
·April 15, 2025gxonatano
If you read indiscriminately from lots of different news sources, bad ones and good ones alike, and you have an iPhone and you do most of your reading on it, this might be useful. But I rarely read news stories which appear in 100 different news outlets, to begin with—they're usually articles which are only on the New York Times: book reviews, commentaries, original data analysis, investigative reporting. The stories that do appear in a few different places are usually syndicated, anyway, from AP or Reuters, so they're virtually identical. Particle appears to be sorting news article groups according to how many different times an event is being reported on, in different news outlets, which to me is the opposite way I want my news sorted. Besides that, I'm fairly picky about where I get my news: I subscribe to certain papers because they've developed good reputations for journalistic integrity, they've won Pulitzer Prizes, and they employ fact checkers. I avoid news sources that don't meet these criteria. Particle seems to lump them all together. Rather than de-noising news, "by using AI to help people understand more, faster," it appears to be introducing noise where there need not be any.
drykiss
Amazing app! It’s so close to “the one” news app I’ve always been trying to find. The section on coverage from across the political spectrum and what’s the difference really helps get a more balanced view of any news. Love that you give summaries that can be clicked and we see the quoted section from different articles!
One improvement would be to show less domestic US news to people from other countries, and more news sources of their own local languages. I think all “international” news apps suffer from this. I keep trying to tune down domestic topics from the US, but still have so much of it on the app, that it becomes a chore over just using a different regional news app
enduser
website for those not on iOS has a very basic (for now) subset of the app https://particle.news
benterix
So the only way to use this is through the app? The website is unusable as half of the screen is taken up by the ad for the app.
enduser
We’ve taken great pains to make an industry-leading app UX. There is a fairly thorough unsolicited 3rd party review here: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIcw07ypsZt/
The web will improve.
benterix
In the meantime I improved your web by removing the ad for the app with uBlock - looks much better now.
enduser
We have a homepage redesign coming in the next month that should make the experience significantly better. For a long time the web site was just a stopgap—glad to finally be giving it some love. Stay tuned!
CharlesW
I wanted to like Particle, but the current user experience is frustrating. The information density is extremely low even on my giant phone (https://imgur.com/a/p6JQCYO), every 10 stories or so it interrupts the flow with "Help us find stories you want to see" CTAs (https://imgur.com/a/y8VVgqC) even though I've already done that twice, and it keeps shoveling sports content at me even though I've completely turned off sports (https://imgur.com/a/MYYZFJ7). I wish the team well, and I'll keep it on my phone and hope the UX improves.
russelldjimmy
I downloaded and I love the concept and the design. I’ll be watching closely and sharing this with my friends! Could use a tiny bit of that final 5% of finishing touches but I love it anyway. Also, I appreciate how good of a first-class iOS citizen it is!
mikhailt
Great news app. Not only does it learn which news you'd like to follow, its AI feature is actaully useful for a change (for me at least); it extracts the data you want to know about and it has a few useful views such as the "opposite views" primpt that I really like using to learn from both sides.
Related articles are great to reduce duplicates and being able to ask questions or seeing questions from other users was great to see.
SebFender
Interesting as I've never been able to find one good source - Consumer of news and podcasts around 10 hours a day here - Some comments - USA centric to the core, in app font size control/colors, much bigger buttons everywhere, AI voice much deeper controls - Cheers and thanks for sharing.
ddejohn
How on earth do you have time to spend 10 hours a day consuming news and podcasts?
edit: and also, do you think that's healthy??
pronouncedjerry
I've been a user for quite a while now. Very well designed and built app. Wish you and the team success!
surprise_
Love this. The app even generates custom share links. I was sending this one to friends earlier today. https://particle.news/share/CU0df
microflash
Just reading through privacy policy brings bile in my throat. https://particle.news/privacy
My RSS reader collects no personal data, thank you very much.
8en
This is a very nicely executed app. What is the revenue model?
Hello HN! Particle News product engineer here.
Keeping up with the news is overwhelming in an age of information overload. Particle reimagines the experience by organizing articles into comprehensive "Stories," offering clear, concise summaries to quickly grasp what matters. Today, we reached the #1 spot in "Newspapers & Magazine" on the iOS App Store—and I thought I'd share a bit of our backstory.
I've been connected to this team for a long time. About 20 years ago, I shared a house with our CTO and co-founder Marcel Molina. I helped him get started with programming. Since then, Marcel has had an extraordinary career—becoming a senior staff engineer at Twitter, where he helped build foundational features like Retweets, Notifications, and Lists, and later working at Tesla on manufacturing execution systems that scaled across Gigafactories.
At Twitter, Marcel worked closely with our CEO and product visionary Sara Beykpour, who led initiatives like Twitter Blue, Twitter Video, and the experimental app twttr. Sara has a background in Software Engineering and Cognitive Science from the University of Waterloo and spent over a decade at Twitter in engineering and leadership roles.
In late 2022, Sara and Marcel started prototyping a news app that could reduce the cognitive and emotional burden of staying informed—by using AI to help people understand more, faster. They were soon joined by a few other former Twitter colleagues who helped shape the early concept into a working iOS application.
I joined about 15 months ago to contribute across the entire stack. Since then, I've helped design and build major iOS features, rewritten our public website on Cloudflare Workers, and implemented new functionality in our Go backend, which is driven by Google Cloud's Pub/Sub architecture.
What Makes Particle News Different
Particle helps you navigate the news effortlessly—leveraging AI to help you understand more, faster. Some highlights:
• Personalized News – Your feed is tailored to your interests. You can follow specific people, places, and things so you never miss what matters to you.
• Clear Summaries – Get a quick overview or dive deeper with detailed, structured context—summarized in natural language.
• Perspective Tools – Features like "Opposite Sides" and our political spectrum chart let you explore stories through multiple lenses.
• Interactive Q&A – Ask questions about any story and get concise answers with sources and citations.
• Audio Summaries – Use the "Play" feature to listen to your feed, specific stories, or even select articles—great for hands-free or on-the-go moments.
One of the things we're most proud of is how Particle supports publishers. We've partnered with outlets like Reuters, AFP, and Fortune to host some of their content via APIs. These partners get prominent placement, and their links are highlighted in gold to stand out. This model aims to drive traffic back to publishers and reward high-quality journalism, rather than just aggregating and commodifying it.
Transparency is a core value: all sources are cited, generated answers are grounded in evidence, and we take real care to prevent AI hallucinations or misleading summaries.
Despite negligible marketing spend, Particle has grown to the top of its category by focusing on engagement with early users and meaningful partnerships with the media ecosystem.
Coming soon: weekday mini crosswords—a new feature designed by another longtime friend of ours from 20 years back who went on to work at Twitter, lead development on Firewatch, and release his own games independently.
It's incredibly fun and rewarding to be building something meaningful with old and new friends. I feel lucky every day to work alongside some of the best product, design, and engineering minds on a project we hope will help people stay engaged with democracy without burning out.