August 10, 2026
When your phone refreshes like a diva
Ask HN: In your experience, what are sound conventions for e-ink UI development?
E-ink fans say designing for these screens feels less like apps and more like making a newspaper
TLDR: One developer wants to build browser-based apps that actually feel good on a black-and-white e-ink phone, where scrolling and constant updates can look terrible. The crowd’s verdict: stop copying modern apps and start borrowing from newspapers, old handhelds, and simpler design eras.
A Hacker News user showed up with a very specific modern problem: they ditched the usual addictive smartphone for a black-and-white e-ink phone and now want to build calmer, simpler web apps that don’t look awful on a screen that refreshes like it’s waking up from a nap. The dream is an e-ink-friendly reader for Lemmy and a chatbot interface that won’t turn every response into a flashing mess. But the real show was in the comments, where developers basically formed a support group for everyone traumatized by slow screen refreshes and ghostly after-images.
The strongest opinion? Stop thinking like a normal app designer. One commenter said e-ink is closer to a moving newspaper than a computer, which is both helpful advice and an accidental roast of the entire modern web. Another said working on a drawing app for a ReMarkable tablet made them realize how much we rely on fast, invisible screen updates; on e-ink, every tiny motion suddenly becomes a dramatic event. Others pushed nostalgia hard, urging the original poster to raid the design graveyard: early Mac interfaces, Palm Pilots, old phones, even text-heavy terminal apps. The vibe was basically, the future of calm tech might look suspiciously like 1997.
There wasn’t a huge flame war, but there was a fun split between “study print design like it’s a magazine” and “study ancient gadgets like it’s a museum field trip.” And honestly? Both camps agreed on one thing: if you try to make e-ink behave like a normal smartphone, the screen will humble you immediately.
Key Points
- •The post requests practical conventions for designing browser-based e-ink interfaces, using a Bigme Hibreak Pro BW as the current target device.
- •The author plans two personal projects: an e-ink Lemmy frontend and an e-ink OpenRouter frontend.
- •The projects are intended to be browser-based instead of native Android apps to maximize compatibility and match the author's existing web-development experience.
- •The author identifies display refresh behavior, grayscale high-contrast design, and lack of direct browser-level refresh control as central UI design constraints.
- •Specific challenges named in the post include buffering streamed LLM output, mitigating ghosting, preferring pagination over scrolling, and relying on layout and typography for visual hierarchy.