The company's video game division houses major studios including Bethesda, Obsidian, 343 Industries, and more.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 85, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, sorry in advance that this week is a tiny bit politics-y, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been reading about Sean Evans and music fraud and ayahuasca, playing with the new Obsidian Bases feature, obsessing over every Cliche” more times than I’m proud of, installing some Elgato Key Lights to improve my WFH camera look, digging the latest beta of Artifacts, and downloading every podcast I can find because I have 20 hours of driving to do this weekend.I also have for you a very funny new movie about tech CEOs, a new place to WhatsApp, a great new accessory for your phone, a helpful crypto politics explainer, and much more. Short week this week, but still lots going on. Let’s do it.(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you reading / playing / watching / listening to / shopping for / doing with a Raspberry Pi this week? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, tell them to subscribe here. And if you haven’t subscribed, you should! You’ll get every issue for free, a day early, in your inbox.)The DropMountainhead. I mean, is there a more me-coded pitch than “Succession vibes, but about tech bros?” It’s about a bunch of (pretty recognizable) billionaires who more or less run the world and are also more or less ruining it. You’ll either find this hilarious, way too close to home, or both. WhatsApp for iPad. I will never, ever understand why Meta hates building iPad apps. But it finally launched the most important one! The app itself is extremely fine and exactly what you’d think it would be, but whatever. It exists! DO INSTAGRAM NEXT.Post Games.Polygon, all about video games. It’s only a couple episodes deep, but so far I love the format: it’s really smart and extremely thoughtful, but it’s also very silly in spots. Big fan.The Popsockets Kick-Out Grip. I am a longtime, die-hard Popsockets user and evangelist, and the new model fixes my one gripe with the thing by working as both a landscape and portrait kickstand. $40 is highway robbery for a phone holder, but this is exactly the thing I wanted.“Dance with Sabrina.” A new, real-time competitive rhythm game inside of Fortnite, in which you try to do well enough to earn the right to actually help create the show itself. Super fun concept, though all these games are better with pads, guitars, or really anything but a normal controller.Lazy 2.0. Lazy is a stealthy but fascinating note-taking tool, and it does an unusually good job of integrating with files and apps. The new version is very AI-forward, basically bringing a personalized chatbot and all your notes to your whole computer. Neat!Elden Ring Nightreign. A multiplayer-heavy spinoff of the game that I cannot get my gamer friends to shut up about, even years after it came out. I’ve seen a few people call the game a bit small and repetitive, but next to Elden Ring I suppose most things are.The Tapo DL100 Smart Deadbolt Door Lock. A $70 door lock with, as far as I can tell, every feature I want in a smart lock: a keypad, physical keys, super long battery life, and lots of assistant integrations. It does look… huge? But it’s pretty bland-looking, which is a good thing.Implosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster. One of a few Titan-related documentaries coming this summer, meant to try and explain what led to the awful events of a couple years ago. I haven’t seen this one yet, but the reviews are solid — and the story seems even sadder and more infuriating than we thought.“The growing scandal of $TRUMP.” I love a good Zeke Faux take on crypto, whether it’s a book or a Search Engine episode. This interview with Ezra Klein is a great explainer of how the Trump family got so into crypto and how it’s being used to move money in deeply confusing and clearly corrupt ways. Cameron Faulkner isn’t technically new to The Verge, he’s just newly back at The Verge. In addition to being a commerce editor on our team, he also wrote one of the deepest dives into webcams you’ll ever find, plays a lot of games, has more thoughts about monitors than any reasonable person should, and is extremely my kind of person. Since he’s now so very back, I asked Cam to share his homescreen with us, as I always try to do with new people here. Here it is, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:The phone: Pixel 9 Pro.The wallpaper: It’s an “Emoji Workshop” creation, which is a feature that’s built into Android 14 and more recent updates. It mashes together emoji into the patterns and colors of your choosing. I picked this one because I like sushi, and I love melon / coral color tones.The apps: Google Keep, Settings, Clock, Phone, Chrome, Pocket Casts, Messages, Spotify.I haven’t downloaded a new app in ages. What’s shown on my homescreen has been there, unmoved, for longer than I can remember. I have digital light switches, a to-do list with the great (but paid) Stuff widget, a simple Google Fit widget to show me how much I moved today, and a couple Google Photos widgets of my lovely wife and son. I could probably function just fine if every app shuffled its location on my homescreen, except for the bottom row. That’s set in stone, never to be fiddled with.I also asked Cameron to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he sent back:Righteous Gemstones on HBO Max. It’s a much smarter comedy than I had assumed (but it’s still dumb in the best ways), and I’m delighted to have four seasons to catch up on. I’m really digging Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which achieves the feat of breakneck pacing (the game equivalent of a page-turner) and a style that rivals Persona 5, which is high praise. I have accrued well over a dozen Switch 2 accessories, and I’m excited to put them to the test once I get a console on launch day.CrowdsourcedHere’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 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.“The Devil’s Plan. This Netflix original South Korean reality show locks 14 contestants in a windowless living space that’s part mansion, part prison, part room escape, and challenges them to eliminate each other in a series of complicated tabletop games. (If this sounds familiar, it’s a spiritual successor to the beloved series The Genius from the mid-2010s.)” — Travis“If you’re a fan of Drive to Survive, I’m happy to report that the latest season of Netflix’s series on NASCAR is finally good, and a reasonable substitute for that show once you’ve finished it.” — Christopher“I switched to a Pixel 9 Pro XL and Pixel Watch 3 from an iPhone and Apple Watch about 6 months ago and found Open Bubbles, an open source alternative to BlueBubbles that does need a Mac but doesn’t need that Mac to remain on, You just need a one-time hardware identifier from it, then it gives you full iMessage, Find My, FaceTime, and iCloud shared albums on Android and Windows using an email address. So long as you can get your contacts to iMessage your email instead of your number, it works great.” — Tim“Playing Mario Kart 8 Deluxe for the last time before Mario Kart World arrives next week and takes over my life!” — Ravi“With Pocket being killed off I’ve started using my RSS reader — which is Inoreader — instead as a suitable replacement. I only switched over to Pocket after Omnivore shut down.” — James“I just got a Boox Go 10.3 for my birthday and love it. The lack of front lighting is the biggest downfall. It is also only on Android 12 so I cannot load a corporate profile. It feels good to write on just, almost as good as my cheaper fountain pen and paper. It is helping me organize multiple notebooks and scraps of paper.” — Sean“Giving Tweek a bit of a go, and for a lightweight weekly planner it’s beautiful. I also currently use Motion for project management of personal tasks and when I was doing my Master’s. I really like the Gantt view to map out long term personal and study projects. (I also got a student discount for Motion, but it’s still expensive.)” — Astrid“Might I suggest Elle Griffin’s work at The Elysian? How she’s thinking through speculative futures and a cooperative media system is fascinating.” — Zach“GeForce Now on Steam Deck!” — SteveSigning offOne of the reasons I like making this newsletter with all of you is that it’s a weekly reminder that, hey, actually, there’s a lot of awesome people doing awesome stuff out there on the internet. I spend a lot of my time talking to people who say AI is going to change everything, and we’re all going to just AI ourselves into oblivion and be thrilled about it — a theory I increasingly think is both wrong and horrifying.And then this week I read a blog post from the great Dan Sinker, who called this moment “the Who Cares Era, where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore.” You should read the whole thing, but here’s a bit I really loved:“Using extraordinary amounts of resources, it has the ability to create something good enough, a squint-and-it-looks-right simulacrum of normality. If you don’t care, it’s miraculous. If you do, the illusion falls apart pretty quickly. The fact that the userbase for AI chatbots has exploded exponentially demonstrates that good enough is, in fact, good enough for most people. Because most people don’t care.”I don’t think this describes everything and everyone, and neither does Sinker, but I do think it’s more true than it should be. And I increasingly think our job, maybe our method of rebellion, is to be people who care, who have taste, who like and share and look for good things, who read and watch and look at those things on purpose instead of just staring slackjawed at whatever slop is placed between the ads they hope we won’t really notice. I think there are a lot of fascinating ways that AI can be useful, but we can’t let it train us to accept slop just because it’s there. Sorry, this got more existential than I anticipated. But I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I’m going to try and point Installer even more at the stuff that matters, made by people who care. I hope you’ll hold me to that.See you next week!See More:

Mozilla recently announced that it's shutting down the read-later app Pocket on July 8, 2025. If you're a fan like I was, now's the time to start looking at alternatives. You have until October 8 of this year to export your saves from Pocket, so get testing now to find the right read-later replacement for you.Use your browser's reading list feature Credit: Pranay Parab I'm a big fan of recommending simple tools, since you're more likely to use them. Browser-based reading lists definitely fall into that category. Both Chrome and Safari have built-in reading lists, which let you save articles for reading later. The Safari version saves articles for offline reading, but Chrome just loads the saved page. You can technically save articles for offline reading in Chrome, too, but the browser treats it like saving the entire webpage and stores it in files that you have to manage separately. That's a lot less convenient than just marking an article as read and deleting it off the device.Use the reading list in Safari by hitting the Share button and tapping Add to Reading List. To access saved articles on your iPhone, tap the bookmarks icon in Safari's tab bar, then the spectacles icon. In Safari for Mac, click the sidebar button next to the green button in the top-left corner of the browser's window, and select Reading List from the sidebar. To save articles offline by default on your iPhone, go to Settings > Apps > Safari, scroll to the bottom, and enable Automatically Save Offline. On the Mac, this is under Safari menu > Settings > Advanced > Reading List.Google Chrome's reading list is under the three-dots menu > Bookmarks and Lists > Reading List on the desktop browser. On Android, tap the three-dots menu and select Star. In Chrome for iPhone, this option is located under the three-dots menu > Add to reading list.As convenient as browser-based reading lists are, they do lack a few features when compared with proper read-later apps, such as tagging, organizing articles by topic or creating custom folders.Instapaper: The closest alternative to Pocket Credit: Instapaper Like Pocket, Instapaper was first launched in the late 2000s, and the service is still around. It offers apps for Android, iPhone, and the web, and has a generous free tier that lets you save, organize, and sync unlimited articles. The free tier shows a few ads to fund the service, though. The premium subscription costs $6/month or $60/year, and it adds useful features such as full-text search, offline reading, and removes ads.The best paid features, though, are speed reading and the ability to send articles to your Kindle. Speed reading flashes one word at a time to help you read articles faster. The send-to-Kindle feature is also quite nice to have for long reads that you'd rather view on an e-ink display.GoodLinks: An excellent read-later app for Apple devices Credit: GoodLinks GoodLinks is a great read-later app for all your Apple devices. You can purchase it off the App Store for $10, which lets you access the app on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. The app lets you highlight text in articles, color code your highlights, and makes it easy to find highlighted content, too. You can save articles for offline reading easily from any website, simply by using the share sheet. The app also recently added support for saving Bluesky threads, which is a nice touch. GoodLinks doesn't require you to create an account and it uses iCloud to sync your reading lists across devices.Note that the app gives you free feature updates for one year after initial purchase. After that, you can continue to use GoodLinks with the features you paid for. If you want additional features developed in the future, you can pay $5/year to access that. The app already has almost all the features you'd need, though, so this business model isn't going to lock out any essentials.Readwise Reader: The best read-later service for power users Credit: Readwise Some people want a read-later service that can host multiple types of content, including videos, text, social media posts, newsletters, and even entire books. Readwise Reader is designed for just that. It lets you highlight text in any text file, and even transcripts of YouTube videos, and syncs those highlights to all your devices. You can even send highlights to apps such as Obsidian or Notion. The app generates a "daily review" for you, too, which is a quick digest of your saved articles that can help you quickly go through important reads.The service also gives you an email address to subscribe to newsletters, and you can also use it to follow RSS feeds of the publications you love. Readwise Reader is an all-in-one app that offers a lot more than just a read-later service, which is great for power users, but it can be overwhelming for someone who just wants to save the occasional article for weekend reading. Readwise Reader has a 30-day free trial, after which it costs $10/month.Matter: For those who value newsletters above all else Credit: Matter Matter is a premium read-later app for the iPhone, iPad, and the web. While it has a free tier, almost all of its best features are in the paid subscription ($15/month or $80/year). This service also gives you an email address, which you can use to subscribe to newsletters and have them sent directly to Matter. I prefer this approach over having newsletters delivered to my already crowded email inbox, and Matter's choice of fonts and distraction-free reading experience make it even better. If you're a paying subscriber, Matter can also scan your Gmail inbox and automatically pick up newsletters from there. To get you started, this service has a curated list of articles for you to read, just like Pocket, which may appeal to some. Other useful read-later servicesThere are a few other useful read-later apps and services that you might want to check out. These aren't as well-rounded as the picks above, but they're worth checking out for specific use cases.Send to Kindle: Amazon offers many ways to easily send files to your Kindle, but the Chrome extension is probably the smoothest way to use your e-reader as a read-later device.Wallabag: This is an open-source read-later service that costs $12.5/year and lets you self-host the service, too. It has apps for Android and iPhone and native clients for Kindle and Kobo, so you can easily access saved articles.Flyleaf: This is one of the best new read-later apps for Apple devices, and its free tier offers all the basics. There is an optional paid subscription ($17/year) if you want tagging and custom color schemes.