# Phyphox

16 Hacker News commenters recommended Phyphox and 0 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 3 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Free app that turns a phone's sensors into physics experiment tools, liked for classroom and hands-on use.

## Why people recommend it

- Phone sensors as experiment inputs (3 comments): "you can use pretty much all of the phone's sensors as inputs for physical experiments" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49974458)) "it turns the phone into a poor man's tricorder, and that's handy sometimes" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738407)) "The coolest thing I ever did with that was finding wires in a friends wall" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47739032))
- Thrilled secondary school physics teachers (2 comments): "I showed the app to a bunch of secondary school physics teachers and they were thrilled." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738440)) "this is our go-to app. We've measured acceleration in an elevator" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738503))
- Fun hands-on measurements at home (2 comments): "I've had great fun using Phyphox to visualise my hand getting closer/farther from my phone" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47739302)) "I used it just the other day." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738866))
- Handy general-purpose measurement toolkit (2 comments): "it turns the phone into a poor man's tricorder, and that's handy sometimes" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738407)) "Good toolkit to have around." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738273))

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Phyphox", https://hackerapproved.com/p/phyphox/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).