A new-old camera, Clubhouse pivots, and smart home apps galore

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 5, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, first of all, hi, hello, welcome, and second of all, you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) 

This week, I also have a new camera, some new speakers, the smart home controller all others should copy, the next big AI music track, some thoroughly modern football-watching tips, and Jennifer Pattison Tuohy’s homescreen. Let’s go.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What do you want to know more about? What awesome tricks do you know that everyone else should? What app should everyone be using? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, forward it to them and tell them to subscribe here.)

The Drop

Pro tips

Happy football season to all who celebrate! This weekend is the beginning of the NFL season, and a lot of people are going to be watching games in a new place: YouTube. The company paid a reported $2 billion for Sunday Ticket this year and has some fun plans for how people can watch games.

I asked Christian Oestlien, YouTube’s vice president of product management, to give us some tips and tricks for how to get the most out of YouTube’s football programming. (Did I do this just so I can watch football all Sunday and call it work? Who’s to say.) Here’s what he came back with:

Screen share

I sometimes wonder how anything in Jennifer Pattison Tuohy’s house actually works. Luckily, she’s better at it than I am. She’s The Verge’s expert on all things smart home, which means she’s constantly rigging up new systems, installing new sensors, and trying to do things like set her smart oven to automatically bake a turkey every time she opens the garage three times in four hours. Or something, I don’t know.

I asked Jen to share her homescreen with us, hoping it would reveal the true chaos that comes with all her smart home testing and reporting. It’s even better than I hoped. Here’s Jen’s homescreen, plus some information on the apps she uses and why:

The phone: iPhone 14. I like small phones and small iPads (preferably in purple), so I find a standard-size phone with an iPad Mini that can fit in my purse the best combo. 

The apps: I currently have 364 apps on my phone. I didn’t realize how unusual that was until an informal survey of The Verge crew put me at about 150 apps more than most of my colleagues (only one other person was even close… David). But it’s the price I pay for a life as a smart home reviewer, where every gadget I test generally requires downloading a new app. 

I manage this chaos by using the swipe down and search function 90 percent of the time, but the top two rows of apps on my homescreen are surfaced by the Siri Suggestions widget. This is surprisingly effective in offering up the right app at the right time. I use two mail apps (work and home), Life360 is how my family keeps track of each other (Apple‘s Find My is just… bad), and the ATP WTA Live app is for the US Open. I’m currently testing robot vacuums and security cameras, hence Roborock, Tapo, and Eufy Security. 

The second two rows are my constant go-tos — Slack for work, Evernote for throwing my life and work into quickly, and Todoist for the same but in a slightly more organized fashion. I’ve been using Evernote for over a decade, and while it has its flaws, it also is my life, literally. Citymapper is the best app for navigating any city in the world, and having just been in Berlin for IFA and London, Bruges, and Paris for fun, it earned itself a spot on my homepage (for now).

Then, the main three smart home platform apps I use for testing — Amazon Alexa, Apple Home, and Google Home — are always on my homescreen. (I also use SmartThings but test that on a Galaxy S22). Untappd is on my homescreen as my neighborhood hangout spot uses it for their daily tap menu. And in the dock, Phone, Safari, Messages, and WhatsApp.

The wallpaper: Pets and kids would be on my wallpaper if I could, but as I take so many screenshots that I publish in my articles, I prefer something less personal. I love the “Earth” live wallpaper that updates based on where you are. (I’ve been traveling so much recently that it’s actually been helpful in reminding me where I am when I wake up bleary-eyed and jet-lagged.)

The widgets: World Clock, essential for keeping track of deadlines when you’re in a different timezone from your boss, and the Apple Podcasts app. I’m a huge podcast addict and am never without one chattering away at me. 

I also asked Jen to share a few things she’s into right now. Here’s what she came back with:

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 with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here every week. 

“One of my favorite websites is Deku Deals. It brings together the PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo stores and allows you to track games that are on sale really easily. You can sign up for email alerts whenever a game is discounted. They also have an iOS and Android app in development. The beta is available through their Patreon and has cemented a homepage space on my phone. – Jon

“Omni Crosswords fetches daily crosswords from major outlets without you having to subscribe to any of them. The only con of this app is that it does not have a hint system. If you like playing tennis games, Australian Open Game is a decent game to kill some time.” – Shivam

“The bookmarking app I never see but highly recommend is Pinboard, which markets itself as ‘Social Bookmarking for Introverts.’ It’s blazing fast because there are no images or lazy loading; it’s just webpages with text links you can add notes and tags to — that’s it. The extensions are great, you can sync to Instapaper and Pocket to extend its ‘Read Later’ functionality, and it’s only $22 a year and promises no tracking or ads. Have I mentioned it’s fast? That’s what did it for me. Every page loads instantly.” – Ethan

“Regarding link buckets: I was a longtime faithful user of del.icio.us (and then Pinboard) for many years, but maintenance on Pinboard has slowed to a halt in spite of its subscription pricing. This led me to seek out alternatives, and I eventually settled on linkding. This is a bookmark bucket service that you must host yourself, which may be an impediment to the majority of your readers, but I love it.” – Josh

“I want to recommend an app I am obsessed with these days: it’s called Yuka. It allows you to scan food items, and it rates food about how good / bad that food is and why.” – Shubham

“I’m really enjoying Read.cv and their little social network app Posts.cv — mostly centered around designers, but it’s fun seeing all the apps and web design all these people are coming up with.” – Christopher

“New World on Netflix. A Korean reality show on a ‘utopian island,’ sort of like a video game turned TV show. They’re gaining virtual currency, and then one of the contestants finds out he can rewind time and undo all the gambling. Fun, inventive, weird show.” – Glenn

“Came across Finalist on Threads, a really slick to-do app that works well for my brain. Focused on daily lists that are easy to carry over, just recently released.” – Rigel 

Signing off

After literally a year of having it pinned on my to-read list, I finally sat down and plowed through The Wrap’s huge retrospective on what happened with the movie John Carter. It’s a really interesting read and made me wonder how many more movies might have gone through the same chaos. And there’s a surprisingly rich genre of YouTube devoted to this exact topic! I’ve been plowing through the channel “It Was a Sh*t Show,” which chronicles all the mess behind everything from Mad Max: Fury Road to Cats to Arrested Development. The stories are wild, the videos are great, and I’m now completely convinced that it’s a minor miracle that anything good ever gets made at all. But I’m glad it does.

See you next week!