One thing I've been wanting to do is write a better mobile UI experience for HN using their api. I visit mostly on my phone and I have such a hard time tapping any of the action buttons (upvoting, minimizing a comment thread, etc). I tried a CSS-only mod using Stylish (I primarily use Firefox on Android) but I wanted to do some stuff that the current HTML structure made difficult.
While I appreciate that they finally added some mobile styling, it was very minimal and ignored accessibility best practices for touch target size.
If you use their Firebase API on iOS or Android then you'll need to make a request for each object, whether it's a news post or comment. If you want to present a comment thread, then you need to request each comment individually, so imagine making 400 requests to present a 400 comment thread.
Their Github docs say to use the Firebase SDK, but the mobile SDKs require that you actually have your own Firebase account and you own the Firebase db, you can't enter an arbitrary Firebase URL and have it "just work."
While I appreciate that they finally added some mobile styling, it was very minimal and ignored accessibility best practices for touch target size.