Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 109, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If youโre new here, welcome, hope youโre staying warm, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, Iโve been reading about Google Maps and shopaganda and life as a pop star, finally getting to watch F1 now that itโs streaming, rewatching the first two Avatars ahead of the next oneโs release, pretending the new Taylor Swift tour doc is a reasonable replacement for actually seeing the tour, buying a bunch of Ikea smart buttons now that theyโre on sale in the US, playing with the excellent new Obsidian update for mobile devices, and spending altogether too much time trying to figure out why my house is so cold.
I also have for you a fun new source of movies to watch, a game to play this holiday season, a new speaker worth a listen, and much more.
And I have a question, looking ahead to the last Installer of the year: Whatโs your favorite new thing from this year? It doesnโt have to be new this year, just new to you. (And you donโt have to pick your one favorite forever, just hit me with something new you loved this year.) I want to hear about books you discovered, podcasts youโre into, decade-old games youโre loving, things that made your house or office or whatever better, anything and everything is fair game. Iโll share mine if you share yours โ email me at installer@theverge.com, find me on Threads at @imdavidpierce, or message me on Signal at @davidpierce.11.
All right, lots of stuff this week! Letโs go.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you playing / reading / watching / listening to / cuddling up with by the fire this week? 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 Letterboxd Video Store. A tightly curated set of movies to rent, filled with stuff Letterboxd knows people want to see but that you almost certainly wonโt find anywhere else. Like all things Letterboxd, itโs all a bit high-minded, but I love this idea and suspect I will check it often. Perfect amount of stuff in there, too.
- Skate Story. A late-breaking contender for the best game of 2025! Youโre a demon, you skate. And skate. And skate. A lot of reviews say the controls take a little getting used to, but that they give way to something that feels great and looks spectacular.
- The iFixit app. I canโt say Iโm shocked that iFixitโs AI bot, FixBot, isnโt quite up to the task of automatically sussing out how to fix all your gadgets. But thatโs fine; Iโll just be using this new iOS and Android app as a library of manuals and repair guides. Plus, the built-in battery monitor for your phone is extremely clever.
- Darkroom 7.0. I totally forgot about Darkroom! It has long been one of the best photo editors for Apple devices, and the new version cleans up the user experience a bunch while also adding some retro-film effects and some high-end video features. Also: Being able to zoom all the way down to the individual pixel is pretty wild.
- Google Photos. On the other end of the professional spectrum, the Google Photos app just got a bunch of CapCut-style video editing features along with some better tools for making highlight reels and slideshows. Iโm suddenly tempted to make a lot of stupid year-in-review stuff to send to my friends.
- Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair. Iโm a sucker for a weird re-edit of a movie, so this is extremely my jam: two Kill Bill movies turned into the single, 4.5-hour bloodfest they were apparently always supposed to be. Apparently itโs a totally different story now! This feels like the best possible use of a weekend afternoon in a movie theater.
- The Wiim Sound Lite. From one of the Installerverseโs favorite audio brands comes a new $229 portable speaker that looks like a strong competitor to Sonosโ new gear. (Or a HomePod, I guess.) If I were starting a home audio system right now, Iโd probably start with Wiim.
- Google Disco. An experimental new browser based on a weird and novel idea: turning collections of tabs into AI-generated, one-off web apps. I donโt expect Disco itself to ever leave Google Labs, but thereโs something awfully futuristic in here.
Raffi Chilingaryanโs Spotted in Prod has long been one of my favorite sites for finding cool design and product touches from around the web. (I feel like, if youโre an app developer, your goal should be to make something weird and cool enough to catch Raffiโs eye.) Raffiโs also a designer and developer. He says right now heโs working on two iOS apps, a Strava competitor called Runbuds and a super clever alarm app called Shift that is designed to help you wake up earlier.
Thatโs all well and good, but my personal favorite Raffi thing is his new personal website, which includes an actual interactive version of his phone, so you can click around his homescreen and see into his apps. Dude took the whole โshow us your homescreenโ and just put me to shame on it. (Also, itโs a .zip domain, which I kind of love for a personal site?)
Anyway, all I have for you is a humble screenshot, but hereโs Raffiโs homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:
The phone: iPhone 15 Pro.
The wallpaper: Solid gray background.
The apps: Retro, (Not Boring) Camera, Google Maps, Photos, Claude, Safari, Apple Notes.
I have my apps organized into 4 folders (money, work, social, vibes), but thatโs a bit boring so Iโll break it out like this:
- TestFlights you should keep an eye on: Arena is a community of curious internet folks that Iโve long wanted to immerse myself into but only once the iOS build got to its current level did I find that easy to do. Net is a promising email startup that uses an AI card stack to make flipping through your emails a breeze with impeccable UX.
- Apps that I will shill till I die: Retro is a weekly photo journal that inspires me to take more photos and lets you send POSTCARDS to your friends & family. (Not Boring) Camera is a gorgeous skeuomorphic camera with really nice presets. Bump is Find My Friends for Gen Z. Radio Garden lets you explore the world through local radio streams. Particle is an amazing AI native news app with super fluid UX. Mercury is the most lovely fintech product for both businesses and now personal banking โ I hope they take over the world.
I also asked Raffi to share a few things heโs into right now. Hereโs what he sent back:
- TBPN & Stratechery podcasts.
- Discovering creative developers and design engineers who showcase their work on tech Twitter.
- Using Claude Code to ship iOS apps as someone without a formal background in software engineering.
- The resurgence of Pokรฉmon and the Trading Card Game app.
Hereโs what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what youโre into right now as well! Email installer@theverge.com or message me on Signal โ @davidpierce.11 โ with your recommendations for anything and everything, and weโll 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.
โNow that finals are over I have been diving into Ghost of Yotei. Crazy beautiful game.โ โ Jeremy
โFinally reading โThe Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green. Despite John living an entirely different life than me, his experiences and understanding of the world possess so many similarities to mine. I give it five stars.โ โ Christopher
โI feel like everyone is sleeping on Amazon Luna, the cloud stream gaming platform that Amazon includes with its yearly subscription. It consistently has A+ games on it. Iโm currently addicted to the newest Bethesda Indiana Jones gameโฆ I hooked up my PS4 controller and am playing one of the greatest games of the past few years at no extra cost.โ โ Alex
โAudible had an insane three months for $1 deal, so Iโve been getting back into audiobooks while I do chores and commute. Currently listening to / reading Alchemised by SenLinYu and itโs fantastic.โ โ Colin
โGot myself a Teenage Engineering PO-12 drum machine on a rare sale. What a glorious little device. Lovely design, and hours of music fun, even for a complete amateur like myself. Plus – it even has a headphone jack! That said – I kind of wish that Iโd gotten the PO-20 instead.โ โ
โStoneBlock 4, an amazing Minecraft modpack, is ruining all my productivity this week.โ โ Anne
โYesterday I watched a badass Polish dude ski down Mt. Everest without oxygen. The feat is unbelievable, but I still think about the incredible footage.โ โ Denim
โIโm OBSESSED with the Xbloom robotic barista machine Iโve owned for a few weeks now. Itโs basically like having a barista on demand 24/7 โ if you love drip coffee this is an endgame coffee machine.โ โ Andrew
โ+1 for Skate Story. Also, the OSTโฆ ๐โ โ Andy
I spent a bunch of time this week learning about Model Context Protocol, which is one of those things that most people will never think about but might be crucial to how technology works going forward. The MCP story is fascinating, but if you just want to quickly understand how the protocol works, and why itโs so important to the whole supposed AI-based future of everything, you should watch this 20-minute video. Greg Isenberg and Ras Mic walk through the whole stack at the perfect level of complexity, and with visuals that actually help (unlike so many videos I watched this week). If every educational video on YouTube were like this one, Iโd be a much smarter person.
One more Installer to come this year. See you next week!
