Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 55, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re fresh here, welcome, get ready to ruin your phone’s storage, and besides you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I’ve been reading about AI girlfriends and Bobbi Althoff and baseball pitchers, watching Nobody Wants This (my favourite fresh show in forever) and the fresh noodle-focused Chef’s Table (a long-standing fave), falling in love with Coldplay all over again, listening to John Oliver talk journalism, playing quite a few Alphaguess, and painstakingly moving all my junk to my fresh blue iPhone 16. It’s so pretty.
I besides have for you a useful fresh way to track your stuff, a large app for posting to social media, a smart fresh way to manage your life on Apple devices, a fresh anime worth watching on Netflix, a fresh version of the best smart ring, and much more. Let’s dig in.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you into right now? What should everyone else be playing/reading / watching / eating / 3D printing / building from Legos this week? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know individual else who might enjoy Installer, tell them to subscribe here.)
The Drop
- The Pebblebee Clip Universal. This tracker works with both Apple’s Find My and Google’s Find My Device systems, which is just specified an evidently good and correct idea! For a multiplatform individual or family, this is simply a way better buy than a bunch of AirTags.
- Croissant. We may not live in the full everything-everywhere, fediverse-y social planet I want, but at least cross-posting is getting easier. This is simply a truly nice-looking iOS app that lets you post simultaneously to Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon. It’s besides just truly good to kind in.
- The Raspberry Pi AI Camera. This is going to be a tinkerer’s paradise: a $70 camera with a built-in AI processor that you can usage for device vision, automated photo-taking, and lots more. I can’t wait to see what people build with this.
- Arc Search for Android. Arc’s inactive my go-to browser, and it’s getting easier to commit to that as the company comes to more platforms. This 1 is inactive very much in beta, but I have it on my Pixel Fold and it’s working beautiful well so far.
- “How I Replaced Notion with Reminders, Numbers, and Notes.” So, so, so many of you sent this to me this week! Joan Westenberg’s deep dive into Apple’s productivity tools is truly smart and detailed and is most likely the way most people should manage their lives.
- Microsoft Copilot. Sure, I’m a sucker for a warm-shaded website and any calming illustrations, but I truly like the fresh look of Microsoft’s AI bot. And I like that Microsoft is looking at Copilot little like a work tool and more like a useful individual helper.
- The Oura ringing 4. I like the Oura ringing a lot, but it’s always been just a bit besides chunky to feel truly comfortable on my finger. This 1 has any neat-sounding fresh features and improvements, but mostly, it seems to be importantly smaller. (And has lost the small flat-tire edge, which is simply a triumph in its own right.)
- Dan Da Dan. A fresh anime that is by just about all accounts both a truly fun communicative about ghosts and aliens and advanced school and a remarkable accomplishment in animation. Fans have been waiting for a fresh title this good for a while, and it sounds like everything we could have hoped for.
- ChatGPT Canvas. We are, slow but surely, getting out of the chatbot era of AI models. This looks a lot like Claude’s Artifacts feature in that it lets you make something from scratch and then edit it in place with the model’s help. It’s fun! And useful!
- The Franchise. The premise of this show — a fictionalized behind-the-scenes look at the cast and crew making a big-budget superhero movie — reminds me a bit of the show Unreal. And I LOVE Unreal. The reviews here aren’t all great, but I’ll be watching anyway.
Screen share
I love erstwhile I ask individual to share their homescreen with us and realize I have absolutely no thought what it might look like. Kyle Wiens, the CEO of iFixit, was 1 of those people: he’s a tinkerer and a builder and an apparent tech fiend, so I thought he might have a million apps and widgets and everything customized just so. But he’s besides a large believer in right to repair and keeping your gadgets working forever, so possibly he’d have, like, a BlackBerry from 2004 that was inactive someway up and running?
Turns out, it was somewhere in the middle. Here’s Kyle’s homescreen, plus any info on the apps he uses and why:
The phone: I have a Pixel 6A, which eked through iFixit’s interior purchasing approval with a 5/10 on our repairability scorecard. Unlike the 5A, it doesn’t have a headphone jack, which is simply a regular frustration. I usage my headphones so much! I’ve almost worn out the USB-C port from utilizing it all day, all day, with a headphone adapter. A couple pins are worn out so USB cables only charge erstwhile inserted 1 direction right now. I request to open it up to fix it! Unfortunately, the USB port is soldered to the main board, making this either a main board swap or a microsoldering repair. The problem with swapping the main board, aside from the expense, is that you lose your data.
Repairability matters. Phones should last at least 10 years, but this telephone is going to conflict to last five. Google has come a long way but inactive has a ways to go. Modularity is longevity.
And eSIMs work large now! This telephone has a SIM card slot, which would service me much better as a microSD expansion bay.
The wallpaper: First of all, dark mode for lyfe. I spend so much time looking at screens, the least they can do is not blast me with all pixel set to maximum white light output!
The wallpaper is the Pixel’s Nature Swept, in orange. This seems like a beautiful good simulacrum of what my future viewport on Mars will look like. Come on Elon, go faster! The next transfer window is only 2 years out.
The apps: Audible, Pocket Casts, Google Maps, Google Photos, Slack, Settings, Phone, Messages, Gmail, Opera, Google Calendar.
I’m addicted to audiobooks. I read 2–4 a week, on about 1.5x (faster for any readers, slower for others). Audible’s app keeps getting buggier over time. It truly feels like they’re trying to drive their customers away. utilizing the app in a mediocre network area is rather frustrating — even erstwhile you’ve already got books downloaded, Amazon’s DRM likes to telephone home way besides often. OpenAudible is rather good, and I’m beautiful tempted to jump ship to a DRM-free alternate like Downpour.
The Google Podcasts app was great, and I’m sad they killed it — but that’s what I get for relying on Google for something useful. Pocket Casts is simply a fantastic replacement. Relatedly, RIP Google Reader and Feedburner. With how good the text-to-voice tools are getting now, how large would that tool have been to autocreate a podcast from your RSS feed?
One of our right to repair coalition members just made this synthetic podcast from Aaron Perzanowski’s seminal book on the topic. It’s amazing! The “podcast” is very close to the origin material, and I didn’t announcement any peculiar mistakes.
I besides asked Kyle to share a fewer things he’s into right now. Here’s what he sent back:
I mostly hatred apps. But sometimes you request one, so let’s talk apps!
- I spend quite a few time in low-reception environments. I realize why carrier execs who live in cities think 5G is simply a good idea, but a very large portion of the US inactive has zero cell telephone coverage. I spend quite a few time calling via Starlink Wi-Fi alternatively than cell towers due to the fact that I don’t have reception on any carrier at my home or the off-grid farm that I’m building.
- MTB Project has all the best trails, and a native app truly is the best way to manage your location in an off-grid environment.
- And onX! It’s expensive, but I usage it so much that it’s worth it. It works flawlessly without cell data, and while all its mapping sources are public, they merge the datasets in a super useful way. The hunting app, of all things, has property ownership data, which is amazing for real property research. We utilized it to investigation the area around the Onion Bottom vicinity in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the site of our fresh distribution center. It beats the pants off all the real estate-specific software like LandGlide. And hunters are super privacy-conscious, so I’m not worried about my tracks getting shared with the planet like Strava does. My biggest beef is that they have 3 separate apps for offroading, hunting, and hiking. They don’t have a way to have all 3 kinds of trails in 1 place, which would be fantastic. Come on, guys!
- iFixit is working on our own app. Our fresh FixHub soldering iron, which Sean Hollister reviewed the another day, communicates via serial interface so it’s easier for hobbyists to tinker with it. WebSerial is simply a web standard, but unfortunately, it’s not supported on any mobile browsers yet. Our native app will bridge the gap until the mobile Safari and Chrome teams add WebSerial support.
Crowdsourced
Here’s what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now as well! Email installer@theverge.com or message me on Signal — @davidpierce.11 — with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature any of our favorites here all week. If you want even more large recommendations than I could fit here, check out the replies to this post on Threads.
“Zing Coach. I’ve spent years looking for workout apps due to the fact that I’m not good at just committing to exercising without a full plan before I start. Zing takes into account your age, gender, and even injuries to compose the best workout agenda for you — utilizing AI (huh!). It costs a bit, but seriously, for those who are constantly switching between workout apps, this is the 1 for you.” – Calvin
“I’m loving my SiliconDust HDHomeRun Flex 4K. Combined with Plex Pass, it is easy the most intuitive and feature-rich OTT viewing experience.” – Joseph
“Imagining Arc by The Browser Company is simply a newish (and ongoing) podcast with CEO Josh Miller about the company’s work on the 2.0 version of the Arc web browser. The show is highly honest about the difficulties the squad has faced and the ideas they’re struggling with, and it’s highly Verge-y in the way it dives into how browsers and technology make us feel. Anyone who’s curious in tech and plan — or is just curious about where Arc is headed — should definitely give it a try.” – Kaiden
“In my never-ending quest to find a good task manager, I came across this dead-simple to-do app called Daily. It’s been perfect for my regular standups and is the perfect place to dump a ton of tasks you request to get done for the day.” – Eddy
“I late stumbled upon a title called Outlanders 2, an updated and enhanced version of the first Outlanders, and it’s wonderful. You take care of a fewer outlanders, with the nonsubjective to survive, build houses, grow the population, hunt for food, and prosper. The visuals are amazing, the mechanics are easy to learn, and the animations and details are just perfect. Combined with the soundtrack, it’s a truly cozy experience that will catch you and most likely never let go.” – Vojta
“I am reading It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth by Zoe Thorogood. She late lost her brother. fresh profits for the amazing graphic fresh from the day her brother left till the end of the year are being donated to intellectual wellness charities.” – Daniel
“I’m by no means an audiophile, but the Qudelix-5K has given fresh life to my studio headphones. Super-quick Bluetooth pairing, and I have mine clipped straight on the headphones, so no dangling cords!” – Jack
“I’m a very organized person, especially erstwhile it comes to traveling. Tripsy for iOS is hands-down the best travel planner app I’ve always tried. It’s truly well designed and easy to use. They even give you flight alerts akin to Flighty, so I’ve stopped paying for Flighty altogether. I’ve tried Tripit before, but that app feels like a dinosaur compared to Tripsy.” – Daniel
“If you’re a fan of newsletters, hoarding bookmarks, and collecting endless net wisdom, you should effort out Pincone. I work in marketing, so my email gets truly cluttered with newsletters — I’ve now added all of them to Pincone, and it has freed my inbox loads! It besides doubles as a bookmarking tool, and I like how I can save everything into files and add tags, it makes it so much easier to find stuff later.” – Lea
“I’m relistening to a series of audiobooks: the Bobiverse. It’s super nerdy and truly good fun!” – Wenzel
Signing off
The “What’s on your desk” series is 1 of my favourite things we do here at The Verge, and I had the pleasance of sharing my own desk this week. If you’ve always wondered about my setup, the gear I use, or where I’m sitting writing this very newsletter right now, this should have everything you request to know.
And if I could leave you with 2 thoughts, it’s these: you can never have besides many charging cables; and actually, being a mess is just fine.
