Neechan
English · Русский
A native iOS client for the imageboards 2ch (2ch.org / 2ch.life) and
4chan, written in Swift 6 and SwiftUI for iOS 26, using Apple's Liquid Glass design
system for the navigation layer.
Unofficial and unaffiliated with either site.
Install
At the moment Neechan is only available through TestFlight.
Download the .ipa from Releases.
The build is unsigned: there is no signing certificate in this repository and there
should not be one. It cannot be installed by tapping it — use
AltStore, Sideloadly, or your own Apple
developer account. iOS 26 or newer, iPhone or iPad.
What it does
- Reading — boards as a catalog or page by page, in list, card or grid layout;
threads with reply counts, quote popups, a replies window, in-thread search, and your
place kept so a thread reopens where you left it. A post or a whole thread can be
translated into your language on the device, and 2ch's likes and dislikes are shown
and can be cast.
- Two imageboards — a switch on the board list flips between 2ch and 4chan.
Favourites, history, hidden threads and everything else you keep belong to the site
they came from, and a pasted link opens on whichever site it names.
- Posting — replies and new threads, the markup toolbar wrapping what you select,
drafts, attachments with metadata stripped and randomised names, 2ch's emoji captcha
with its proof-of-work, and 4chan's slider captcha. 4chan's posting host answers only
a browser, so on 4chan the captcha and the post go through a hidden in-app web view;
when Cloudflare wants to check the browser first, its check appears inside the
captcha box, and Get Captcha counts down whatever wait the site sends.
- Media — a gallery with zoom and a full-screen viewer; WebM, MKV and MP4 play through FFmpeg,
and a WebM you save is converted to H.264 MP4, because Photos will not accept one.
Clips play from half to double speed, step a picture at a time while paused, and show
a picture of where the scrubber is while it is dragged. Text in a picture can be
selected with Live Text, a picture can be looked up on Yandex, Google Lens, SauceNAO or
iqdb, and files can be saved many at a time, from the grid or a whole thread at once.
- Doomscroll — a thread's videos as a full-screen vertical feed: one clip per
screen, autoplaying, looping and silent, with one sound control for the whole session
and the next clip fetched ahead so a swipe does not land on black.
- Keeping up — favourites with a watcher and unread counts, notifications, history,
threads saved for offline reading, and the board archive.
- Filtering — autohide rules with a live regex tester, hidden threads collapsed to a
line, hidden posts, and per-thread rules.
- Restrictions — one screen that says what the app will show: NSFW mode, which
blurs every thumbnail until you tap it, and an 18+ gate. Boards meant for adults stay
in the directory with the gate shut — nothing goes missing — but they refuse to open,
and the refusal offers the way through. Threads on them keep out of Favorites, History
and Saved threads until you turn it on, and nothing is deleted.
- Fitting in — themes, including ones imported from a theme file, text and thumbnail
scaling, an iPad split view, and English, Russian and German throughout.
Build from source
Requirements:
- macOS 26 with Xcode 26.6 or newer
- XcodeGen (
brew install xcodegen)
make gen # regenerate Neechan.xcodeproj from project.yml
make test-packages # fast: pure Swift package suites, no simulator
make sim # build, install and launch on the iPhone simulator
make ipa # unsigned .ipa in .build/, the same build CI publishes
make test additionally runs the simulator test bundles. Those include XCUITests that
drive the app against the live sites, so they need a network and they will fail when
2ch or 4chan is having a bad day; make test-packages is the offline half.
FFmpeg comes from neechan-ffmpeg, a trimmed LGPL build of the
libraries this app actually uses. It is an ordinary binary package dependency: Swift
Package Manager fetches the xcframeworks from that repository's release, about twenty
megabytes zipped, against the gigabyte and a bit a general-purpose FFmpeg distribution
carries. Nothing has to be cloned or built by hand.
Neechan.xcodeproj is generated and not committed. Edit project.yml instead and
re-run make gen.
Releases
Pushing a version tag builds and publishes one:
git tag v2.1.0 && git push origin v2.1.0
.github/workflows/release.yml runs the package tests,
builds the unsigned .ipa with make ipa, and attaches it to a GitHub Release. The
same workflow can be run by hand from the Actions tab, which leaves the build as a
workflow artifact instead of publishing it.
Layout
| Path | What lives there |
|---|
Neechan/ | The app target: entry point, Info.plist, asset catalog |
Packages/NeechanAPI | HTTP client for both sites, per-site adapters, models, comment HTML parser, captcha, posting. Foundation only |
Packages/NeechanSettings | User preferences backed by UserDefaults |
Packages/NeechanCore | Domain engine (pure logic), SwiftData store, service actors |
Packages/NeechanMedia | Image and video playback, and the WebM converter. The only module allowed to import FFmpeg |
Packages/NeechanUI | SwiftUI screens, the Liquid Glass components, string catalog |
Packages/NeechanTestSupport | Recorded API fixtures and their loader |
Tests/NeechanUITests | XCUITests that drive the app against the live site |
Tools/record-fixtures.sh | Re-records the 2ch fixtures from the live site |
Tools/record-4chan-fixtures.sh | The same for 4chan |
Packages/NeechanCore/Sources/NeechanCore/Engine holds pure, synchronous value logic
with no SwiftData or networking imports. That is where most of the test suite lives.
Licensing
Neechan is distributed under the MIT licence (see LICENSE).
It links FFmpeg, used under the LGPL-2.1-or-later. The build is this project's own:
trimmed to the containers and codecs an imageboard actually serves, and configured with
neither --enable-gpl nor --enable-version3, so it carries no GPL component. The
script that produces it lives in the neechan-ffmpeg repository alongside the exact
configure line.
