The game emulator your phone has been missing

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 35, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, get ready to open some tabs, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) 

I also have for you a surprisingly gadget-y week! We have a new set of earbuds to try, a new handheld camera, an AI memory system, a new audio-first social network, and much more. (Oh, also, a programming note: Installer is off next week, back May 4th.) Let’s get into it.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you into this week? What should everyone else be playing / reading / watching / eating / doing? 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

Group project

In last week’s Installer, I asked you all to share what you use AI for. Thanks to everyone who emailed, texted, Threads-ed, and Mastodon-ed me with your thoughts!

The main thing I heard, over and over and over again, is that you don’t use AI. A lot of you said you actively avoid it, wish your favorite apps would stop integrating it, and don’t really see much use for it at all. I get that; that’s how I feel about a lot of AI. There are so many neat-sounding things out there that turn out to kind of suck and mostly be a hassle that, at some point, you just kind of give up.

But! I did get a bunch of cool recommendations of apps and tools y’all like, so let me share a few I heard about:

More broadly, there were a few use cases I heard a bunch of times, not necessarily tool-specific but instead just something useful you can do with AI:

The overarching theme of your responses was that AI is useful… as a starting point. It’s a good tool to go from “I have to do a thing” to “I have now done a first, not very good, version of a thing.” Which is progress! If you’d rather edit an email than write one or tweak your presentation rather than build it from scratch, AI can be a help. But do not trust it to finish the job. You’ll end up submitting Shrimp Jesus in the quarterly report, and nobody needs that.

I’ve been working on some stuff about other good AI tools, too, so stay tuned — and keep sending recommendations!

Screen share

One of my favorite things about Parker Ortolani, a product manager for consumer products here at Vox Media, is that he usually has better ideas about Apple products than Apple does. (Except for his deeply confusing love for the Vision Pro, but we’ll let that one go.) He’s always doing concept art for Apple apps, fixing dumb things about iOS, and even thinks Siri might someday be great. I love this for him. 

Anyway, I asked Parker to share his homescreen with us because I figure Parker’s the kind of guy who might spend way too much time thinking about the layout and organization of everything. And I figured he’d have a bunch of custom icons and stuff no one even knew existed. I was right!

Here’s Parker’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:

The phone: I’m currently using an iPhone 15 Pro in natural titanium. It’s easily my favorite iPhone since the X. Though I barely use the Action Button, the much lighter frame and USB-C have been game-changers.

The wallpaper: On the homescreen, I am using a dark knit background shared by the folks over at Impending who make the excellent Clear to-do list app, which is also my task manager of choice. I like a dark background generally, but using the pure black can get boring, so it’s nice to add a little texture. iOS just feels smoother with a black wallpaper.

The apps: Messages, Photos, YouTube, Instagram, Fantastical, Soulver, Slack, Transit, Maps, Copilot, Perplexity, Delta, Bulletin, Clear, Overcast, Arc, X, Threads, Apple Music.

I primarily use X to keep up with news, startups, the hot AI companies, and folks just building cool things, while Threads has become the best app for keeping up with entertainment and interacting with writers and journalists. Instagram is floating around there, too, but that’s more for just keeping up with friends and mindlessly scrolling through adorable dog videos. 

Living in New York, knowing the current subway times is a must. I’ve tried all of the New York subway apps, even the new official MTA one that’s surprisingly good, but ultimately, nothing comes close to Transit. It has far and away the best user interface, updates fast, and always has what I want right at the surface. A great bonus is that it has an excellent Apple Watch app as well.

Fantastical has been one of my favorite apps for years. It’s just one of those tools you’ll have to pry from my cold, dead hands. The ticker and list UI is the absolute best calendar experience out there. And there are native counterparts on every Apple platform (sans tvOS, for obvious reasons).

There’s lots of AI stuff here, too. While folks tend to laud Arc Search’s AI-generated webpages that can replace traditional search (which are indeed awesome), I personally just love the care that’s gone into the user interface. I supplement Arc Search with Perplexity, which I tend to use as my go-to for complex deep searches. I find that it’s best at that. Bulletin is a relatively new RSS reader with powerful AI features and a gorgeous design — the progressive blurs just make me swoon.

Apple Weather and Apple Maps have gotten really good over the past few years, so I feel less compelled to use third-party alternatives these days. I like Apple Weather so much that I’ve given it a giant widget slot at the top for the hourly forecast. (I have a love / hate relationship with widgets on iOS: they take up a lot of space, and I often find more value in having a bunch of app icons.) I’ve tried Spotify a bunch of times but always come back to Apple Music.

I like my podcasts to be separated from music, though. And while I’ve been playing around with the new Apple Podcasts transcripts feature, I’ve come back to Overcast. I listen to so many shows that a dense, truly customizable interface is a must-have for me. 

I also asked Parker to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he shared:

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 +1 203-570-8663 with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here every week. Also, for even more recommendations than I could fit here, check out this Threads… thread.

“I’ve been watching Delicious in Dungeon on Netflix, and I’m super loving it! Also been playing Helldivers 2 and the new Destiny 2 stuff and poking at a bunch of iPhone 15 reviews to see if I should get that over a 13 now that my 2020 SE has a basically defunct battery and I’ve never actually had a ‘flagship’ device.” – Tyler

“I’ve been really enjoying the new podcast from Seth Meyers and The Lonely Island. As well as being deeply silly, it’s a fascinating look behind the scenes of SNL at what went into making the legendary SNL Digital Shorts. It’s inventively called The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast.” – Jonathan

“I recommend that you check out Lunch Money. I’ve been using this solopreneur-built app to organize my finances for the past couple of years. It’s been wonderful to use and has taught me financial discipline. It’s one of the few subscriptions that I’m happy to pay for.” – Akshobhya

“Recently played around with augmented reality to put together a mixed-space painting session. It was really fun. Footage here for anyone curious about it.” – K

“On the recommendation of my fav gaming podcast, The Besties, I’ve been playing Slice & Dice for iOS — it’s an RPG battler where all attacks, both yours and your enemies’, are determined by actual dice rolling around a virtual dice tray, and instead of leveling up to get better weapons, you get better dice. Really neat idea done well, great couch companion.” – Nick

“I wanted to share the app CropSize for iOS. I find myself taking multiple screenshots on social media (usually memes) and find it super cumbersome to have to crop every tweet or Instagram post so my friends don’t see the entirety of my feed. CropSize lets you batch-process images super easily and quickly. It is unfortunately $2.99, but tbh I’m just glad it’s not a subscription service. Time saver!” – Keyser

“Just finished the latest video from MKBHD’s “The Studio,” where Mariah [Zenk] talks about the future of food automation tech.” – Josh

“I changed podcast providers to AntennaPod from Pocket Casts, just got sick of the upselling and paywalls in the app. Weird to think I’d rather have an app that was less feature-rich than one that offered the extras for a subscription fee. Also it’s a very good app and I’m happy I made the change.” – Benjamin

“​​The Fallout show got me hooked to head back into the Wasteland again... Gone back to my favorite, Fallout 3.” – Max

“Reading Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson, setting up my first NAS, and hoping that the weather cooperates for me to go play Disc Golf this weekend.” – Dylan

Signing off

My house is full of Ikea furniture. Shelves, beds, tables, chairs, you name it, it’s mostly Ikea. (It was a big moment in my adult life when we graduated from “the cheap Ikea stuff” to “the fancy Ikea stuff,” and if you shop at Ikea, you know what I mean.) So, of course, I’m already looking around my basement office to see where I can fit stuff from the new Brännboll collection of rolling loungers, toy shelves, and deeply weird donut chairs that can’t possibly be comfortable. I don’t know why most of this qualifies as “gaming” furniture, but I do know I need that rolling pegboard cart thing as soon as possible. Forget the bar cart. I’m ready for a VR cart.

See you next week!