Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 117, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, please send Android tips, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I’ve been reading about Eileen Gu and Ozempic and fancy grocery stores, trying out the beautiful Shiori bookmarking app, trying to temper my expectations for the Scrubs reboot, continuing my test of the Pixel 10 Pro, building my dream to-do list app with Claude Code (it’s almost done!), enjoying the beginnings of The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins, recording the next season of Version History, watching all of The Earliest Show again after it showed up on my YouTube, and eating altogether too many Garden Salsa Sun Chips.
I also have for you the first big phone launch of the year, a new-old weather app, a way to maybe make your YouTube a little cheaper, a bunch of stuff to watch this weekend, and much more. Missed you last week! Let’s get back at it.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you reading / watching / playing / listening to / turning up to 11 this week? Tell me everything: [email protected]. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, forward it to them and tell them to subscribe here.)
- Acme Weather. Years after it was acquired by Apple and went away, there’s still no good replacement for Dark Sky. (Though I have been pretty happy with Hello Weather!) Super exciting to see the team go back out on their own, and I already like what they’re up to with their new iOS app. The multi-forecast stuff in particular is just fabulous.
- Samsung’s Galaxy S26 Ultra. A relatively minor upgrade this year, but I think the built-in privacy display is a genuinely great new bit of hardware. Terrible for me, an incorrigible snoop of other people’s phones, but probably a good thing for society at large. And really cleverly implemented!
- Resident Evil Requiem. I have really come to love a game that scares me, because it keeps me engaged like basically nothing else. By all accounts, this game is all that and even more. I will be playing alone, in the dark, terrified, as we are meant to do.
- Current. This is from last week, but it feels relevant: This is the RSS app Terry Godier promised a couple of issues ago! It’s clean, it’s quiet, it feels practically meditative next to most RSS readers. It’s not exactly meant for my frenetic newsgathering use case, but wow is it nice to use.
- Wispr Flow for Android. The more I use these cross-app, AI-powered dictation apps, the more I enjoy talking instead of typing on all my devices. There are a lot of good apps on iOS (including Monologue, which launched last week!), but Android is woefully underserved. This is a welcome addition to the options.
- “The Internet Was Weeks Away From Disaster and No One Knew.” The title is… a lot, but this Veritasium video is actually a really good primer on a lot of really important security things, and has one of the most delightful hero stories you’ll find.
- Notion Custom Agents. Notion is doing a really good job of bringing AI features to the tools you’re already using, and I keep hearing good things about custom agents. They know where your data is, they can build almost anything, they’re totally autonomous… vibe coding, but make it business.
- “How Red Bull Built Its Empire.” I have always wondered how an energy drink company managed to fund all the sports teams, stunts, and various shenanigans that Red Bull does. This is a fascinating history of a company that is way more than a beverage company… but is actually very much a beverage company.
- The New York Times Midi. Oh, what’s that? Another crossword to do every day instead of working, that won’t be punishingly difficult half the time but also will take more than 34 seconds to complete? Oh okay cool sounds great I will do it every day forever thanks.
- YouTube Premium Lite. This is mostly a PSA, because I didn’t know this tier even existed. But now that it includes video downloads and (most importantly) background playback, Premium Lite is about half the price of Premium but has almost all of the best features. I might need to downgrade.
Meredith Haggerty is one of those people you meet and you’re immediately like, Oh, you’re much cooler than I am. The more I get to know Meredith, a new(ish) editor here at The Verge, the more I realize how correct my first assumption was. Meredith has written about fashion and culture and brands and TV shows and also recently made a Pride and Prejudice joke that made me laugh so hard I spilled coffee all over my keyboard. Technically, Meredith owes me a keyboard.
I asked Meredith to share her homescreen with us, both because I think it’s a fun way to get to know new people here and because I want her to tell me about cool things but I don’t want to just constantly badger her for TV recs. Here’s her homescreen, plus some info on the apps she uses and why:
The phone: An iPhone 17. Until very recently, I was clinging to an iPhone 12 mini that I’d gotten as a hand-me-down corporate gift from a friend; it was so tiny and good and I had the perfect phone case. (Ben Affleck smoking a cigarette in a mask. A conversation starter!) But the battery became glacial, even after a couple of trips to the Genius Bar, and I had to give it up.
The wallpaper: A screenshot of Roku City, fall edition. I find Roku City very calming, so I decided to keep it with me.
The apps: Spotify, Messages, Mail, Chrome.
I’m especially dependent on Notes, and here you can see my three main categories of Note: things I need to do, things I need to buy, thoughts I probably would have tweeted a few years ago. I love that the MTA app will tell me when I should leave for the train, but I almost never check it before I leave my house. For the weather, I actually rely on the New York Metro Weather Instagram account; my boyfriend hates it when I tell him what number the vibes are.
To be clear, this attempt to simplify my homescreen hasn’t alleviated my time-wasting at all. Beyond this page, I have a loopy number of apps, mostly put into folders to keep me away from them, which doesn’t work. I’m still always scrolling to the last page, to the last folder, to the last page of that last folder, so I can play a mobile game I don’t enjoy called Drop the Cat. There’s maybe nothing worse in my life than the hold that mobile games I don’t enjoy have on me. I’m not even a cat person.
I also asked Meredith to share a few things she’s into right now. Here’s what she sent back:
- Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette. I’m appropriately ashamed of watching this show (I’m sorry, Schlossberg family!), but it’s a fantastic combination of cool and dumb. One second it makes smoking a cigarette in 1994 while wearing Calvin Klein look like the apex of human existence; the next, Fake JFK Jr. is pointing to an actor in a thick white wig, saying, “Have you met my uncle Teddy?” We shouldn’t even talk about the scene where Jackie O dances to Camelot.
- I recently downloaded an app called Rodeo that might actually solve a phone-based problem for me. It parses the deluge of recommendations from TikTok or Instagram, if you happen to be on the “wealthy children pose with food” side of those apps. You screenshot the clip, send it to Rodeo, and it grabs the relevant information and can save it in fairly handy lists.
- The library. This might be stolen valor from the Meredith who had not yet downloaded Drop the Cat, but a little over a year ago I moved closer to the library and have really been cashing in on how free those books are. Plus, the Brooklyn Public Library app is so good, letting me put things on hold whenever I happen to think of them. I’m currently reading Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence, which I am probably incorrectly not as into as her The Mighty Red, and we don’t have to talk about how many times I’ve renewed it because I’ve been playing phone games instead.
- Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. I’d never watched Viceland’s Nirvanna the Band the Show before I went to see the movie, and you currently cannot do so legally, so probably I still haven’t. I didn’t need it to enjoy the movie, though, which is hilarious and sweet and made me go “How did they do that???” so many times.
Here’s what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now as well! Email [email protected] or message me on Signal — @davidpierce.11 — with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here every week. For even more great recommendations, check out the replies to this post on Threads and this post on Bluesky.
“Marathon (a new extraction shooter game by Bungie) is having an open play-test / demo this weekend so that’s what I’ll be into for the next few days.” – Janego
“Really enjoying Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter by Heather Fawcett (author of the delightful Emily Wilde series). Feels like a cross between Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and Howl’s Moving Castle.” — Spencer
“Since 1Password have upped their price I’ve spent a few hours moving over to Apple Passwords and Uplock. Was mostly okay, but it’s a shame you can’t transfer over all your passkeys to Apple Passwords. Uplock having a lifetime purchase is a big plus.” — Matthew
“Been watching Demon Slayer this past month, and FINALLY watched the Infinity Castle movie in a theater, and, it’s so clear how these anime movies are wildly different (and spectacular!) in tone, direction and characterization from our current crop of Hollywood blockbusters.” — Anshuman
“I just yesterday switched my family from my grandfathered free Google Apps plan for our custom domain email to Fastmail. Fastmail is private but supports industry standard IMAP and CalDAV protocols, so we can use the built-in mail apps on our phones and computers.” — Mike
“I’ve been listening to Comedy Bang Bang! Still super funny. Big Paul F. Tompkins fan.” — Mo
“Star Trek Voyager: Across the Unknown. Despite the occasionally brutal RNG, it’s so fun to be able to dive into my favourite Trek stories and tweak the outcomes.” — Jono
“Reading the first book in the On the Calculation of Volume series. It’s a time loop story, like Groundhog Day but way more realistic and sorta sad but it’s great so far!” — Colin
“The news of the YouTube app coming to the Apple Vision Pro made me re-watch the only good use of 360 video I’ve seen: ‘How TV screens made watching movies worse,’ a fully 3D-animated, 20-minute video essay about how the home releases of movies differ from their theatrical cuts and why that matters, and how the physical size of TV screens makes an impact on content. If you have a Vision Pro it’s worth pulling out just for this video. After that, watch everything else that YouTuber (Noodle) has made.” — Nathan
This winter has been a disaster, where I live and many other places. So much snow, so many snow days, so much chaos. First of all, I hope you’ve all stayed safe and warm and well! Second of all, there is one bit of good news in all this: Casey Neistat is out in New York City vlogging again. All these years later, nobody YouTubes quite like Casey YouTubes. Between this and the return of Paul Ford’s blog, it almost feels like the good internet is coming back. Here’s hoping.
