Plus, in this week’s Installer: A new app for the fediverse, another Mario movie, a secure video chat app, and more.
Apr 4, 2026, 12:00 PM UTC
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 122, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, go ’Zona, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I’ve been reading about early Apple employees and weather apps and one-page productivity systems, watching Avatar: Fire and Ash on my phone in installments the way James Cameron intended, trying and failing to find a better Gmail address than the dumb one I picked 20 years ago, watching the Artemis II launch because space is awesome, buying a new mug that was too expensive but is extremely awesome, replacing my work soundtrack with this incredible DJ set from Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter, listening to the Darknet Diaries episode about music fraud (thanks to Josh for the rec), and fine-tuning the first vibe-coded thing I’ve ever made that’s actually any good.
I also have for you a new way to read the internet, a new Mario movie, a more private way to do video chat, and more. Lots of apps this week! You love to see it. Let’s do it.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you watching / playing / reading / listening to / spreading cheese on 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.)
Sofa 5. A huge update to an Installerverse favorite, this app is now a great way to manage everything you want to watch, read, play, and even do IRL. I never quite made it stick when it was mostly just movies and shows, but now I think of it as like a Notion for my personal life. Apple devices only, alas, but boy do I love this app.
Surf. After a long beta, this feed reader / social network / timeline app finally launched, and I still think it’s a great idea. The fediverse doesn’t have to look like Twitter! It can be lots of things! Surf is one of those things.
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. The cast for this movie is just unbelievably stacked, and while the reviews aren’t great, they weren’t for the last one, either, and I loved that movie! I suspect my kid and I will watch this approximately 446 times.
Hozy. I’ve only really recently come to appreciate the cozy game genre. Life is hard, y’all; it’s nice to have something calmingly mindless to do. In this case, that thing is home renovation and decoration, and it’s far more fun than it has any right to be.
Proton Meet. There are a lot of good reasons to be worried about the privacy of your meetings, the recordings of those meetings, the AI summaries of those meetings, and everything else. Proton’s new tool is encrypted, simple, and seems to work well. Gonna swap a lot of Google Meets for this.
“Jeopardy! YouTube Edition.” Do not watch this thinking it’s a terrific episode of Jeopardy. Watch it for the nonstop meme references, Ken Jennings trying his best to be young and hip, and a bunch of extremely answerable questions for anyone who’s a little too online.
Day One Chat. A chatbot that prompts you through a journal entry, so that every day is a conversation instead of a monologue. It’s definitely not how everybody journals, but it might make the habit easier to start. (You should also worry about giving journal entries to AI tools, by the way, but Day One seems to be handling this one the right way.)
NewsBlur for Android. There are not enough good RSS readers for Android. NewsBlur is one of the best, and the new version got a much-needed redesign plus a bunch of new organization and discovery features. Might be my new go-to feeds app on Android.
“Cindy Cohn – Fighting for Digital Human Rights in Privacy’s Defender.” A terrific, extended Daily Show segment with the head of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which turns into an incredibly comprehensible take on why privacy matters and what we can do to preserve it. So many conversations about this turn wonky and circular, but Cohn is crystal clear. I need to go read her book now.
Screen share
I’ve been using Twos, a note-taking and to-do list app, a lot over the last couple of years. The app does a lot, but in a very straightforward way, and it just works the way my brain does. All of my problems with the app have been with its design and its polish — the