Plus, in this week’s Installer: Samsung’s new phones, a beautiful take on RSS, the Red Bull story, and more.
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, Ozempic, and fancy grocery stores, trying out the 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 Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins, recording the next season of Version History, watching The Earliest Show again, and eating 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.)
**Screen share**
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.