The 2025 Android upgrade cycle has begun, thanks to Samsung and Google

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 68, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, hope you’re staying warm and sane, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) 

This week, I’ve been reading about Kieran Culkin and insomnia and the eBay for fancy startup stuff, finally watching The Wild Robot, thinking a lot about my shopping habits while watching The Mega-Brands That Built America, adding a bunch of Baseus retractable cables to my travel kit, playing an amazing browser-based rendition of the Atari game Pitfall!, testing out the new Spark calendar for Android, and trying to copy Babish’s delicious-looking breakfast sandwich.

I also have for you the biggest new phone in the Android world, the GPU every gamer’s going to want, an impossible test for AI tools, a clever Google alternative, and much more. It’s been a somewhat quiet week for new stuff, honestly, since it’s both post-CES doldrums and utter political chaos. But we’ve still got great stuff to talk about! Let’s do it.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you watching / reading / cooking / downloading / building with Legos / strapping to your wrists this week? What should everyone else be into as much as you are? Tell me everything: [email protected]. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, tell them to subscribe here.)

• The Samsung Galaxy S25. The S25 Edge is definitely Samsung’s most interesting phone this year, and the Ultra is probably the best one, but honestly the whole lineup is a little boring this time? Still, I really do appreciate that Samsung’s shipping a high-end, reasonably sized, full-featured flagship smartphone for $800. This is the Android phone I suspect most people will end up with this year.
• Star Trek: Section 31. The reviews for this new Paramount Plus movie are, uh, all over the place. People still have strong feelings about Star Trek, who knew?! But I love Michelle Yeoh, and I am frankly excited to have an excuse to dive back into that universe for the first time in a while. Also: more two-hour movies and fewer ten-hour limited series, please.
• Humanity’s Last Exam. An incredibly fun and thought-provoking — and also mind-bendingly hard — test that a bunch of researchers think represents something like the final frontier for AI. (All the models currently fail spectacularly.) I’ve learned a ton just poking around the questions. 
• Perplexity Assistant. Frankly, I’ve never found Perplexity’s actual search results all that good, but this company is really good at building products that are fun to use. This new Android app is a step toward more task-doing AI — a bit like OpenAI’s new Operator feature but without the $200 monthly price.
• Android 16 public beta. Not much in the way of ground-breaking new stuff this year, but the Live Activities-style lockscreen notifications are cool. And if you have a foldable phone, you’ll like the forced app resizing. Curious about the night mode camera upgrades, too. 
• The Night Agent season 2. I dug the first season of this show, which (like a lot of Netflix shows) was probably an episode or two too long but still really fun. Sounds like the second season is just as fun and fast-moving.
• The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090. $2,000 is a steep price for a GPU, but Nvidia’s latest beast seems to be clearly the best thing in 4K gaming. (It’s not technically shipping until next week, but if you want one of these I have a feeling you’ll need to get in early.)
• “Why streaming will destroy the typical sports fan.” This is both an economic study of sports rights and a cultural history of how sports came to matter so much on television in the first place. The Jenga tower cable bundle metaphor is so good I’m furious I never thought of it.
• Brave Rerank. Brave is one of the better non-Google search engines, and this is such a no-brainer good idea of a feature: you get to up- and down-rank which domains you want to see in your results. A little tweaking goes a long way, too.

Every once in a while, Mike McCue and I jump on Google Meet and rant at each other about the future. Mike is the CEO of Flipboard, a tech executive all the way back to the Netscape days, and both a realist and a total bleeding-heart optimist about what technology can be. Recently, what we’ve mostly talked about is Surf, Flipboard’s new feed-reader app. 

I think Surf, or something like it, is the future. (There’s also the new Reeder and Project Tapestry, which have similar ideas — but Surf is the most ambitious one I’ve seen yet.) It’s social, but it’s not controlled by any single company; it’s personalized, but only in ways that you choose. All this stuff is still super early, but every time X changes or TikTok goes away, it becomes clear that we need something very different.

Oh, and I have fun news: if you sign up for Surf with the code “Installer,” you can skip the waitlist line and try the app out. Right now you need a Mastodon account to get in (which is easy enough to sign up for), but Mike says Bluesky support is coming soon, too.

Anyway! I asked Mike to share his homescreen, plus give us a glimpse into some of the feeds he’s enjoying most right now. Here is his homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:

The phone: iPhone 16 Pro Max.

The wallpaper: I alternate between Apple’s Earth and photos of my family. It’s easy and fun to change wallpapers on iOS. The Earth wallpaper is dynamic throughout the day. I like how it reminds me that I’m just a tiny speck in space and time.

The apps: Apple Maps, Gaia GPS, Windy, Sky Guide, Spotify, Google Calendar, Safari, Leica Fotos, Apple Photos, Pixelfed, Flipboard, Threads, Ivory (a Mastodon client), Bluesky, Surf Beta.

If there’s one takeaway here, it’s that I’m a social web nerd, and I’m hopelessly addicted to news and social media.

My saving grace is that I do manage to get outside a fair bit. I recently switched to Apple Maps (I love the presentation when driving), and I use Gaia for trails when I’m hiking or mountain biking. Windy is the best weather app out there (I bought a premium subscription for sailing). That said, I think MyRadar is best at answering the question, “Is it about to rain? And for how long?” I use Sky Guide a surprising amount. It’s especially fun to spot and track the planets and the space station with my kids.

The lower right quadrant has my most used apps because I can easily reach them one-handed. Of these, Apple Notes is where I spend by far the most time. It’s where I do all of my thinking, planning, and writing for work and life. I know there are more powerful alternatives out there, but Notes is so simple and just works.

For social media, I use a mix of Mastodon (via Ivory), Bluesky, and Threads, three of the main apps on the social web. I also love the new Pixelfed app. Not only is it built on ActivityPub, it’s like what Instagram used to be. I stopped posting on Instagram years ago because it got so noisy. It’s nice to start sharing photos again.

I also asked Mike to share a few things he’s into right now on Surf. Here’s what he sent back:

• NBAThreads by David Rushing: Real-time commentary from fans on Threads and Bluesky during games. Lots of great videos and podcasts between games.
• FilmFeed by David Imel: Beautiful photos from a curated list of film photographers. Like Instagram for film fans.
• Guardians of the Fediverse by Tim Chambers: My go-to feed for connecting with people who are building on the social web.
• SkyTok: Trending videos on Bluesky and videos tagged with #SkyTok. Also available directly on Bluesky as a custom feed.

Here’s what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now as well! Email [email protected] 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.

“Nothing published a very interesting video about how the design of iOS & Android can have a different impact on your mental state and how different cultures approach design in general. Super interesting stuff.” — Teo

“UFO 50! Truly incredible compilation of 50 new retro-style indie games, built around a fictional game company in the 80s. It’s all I’ve been playing and I’ve only played about 15 games so far.” — Jelly

“Watching Unrivaled, the new 3 on 3 women’s basketball league, on TNT / TruTV / Max! So much fun to watch the best basketball players play with more space and a different format from traditional basketball.” — Renata

“I got a Miyoo A30 this week, installed Spruce (a custom firmware) on it, and now I’m playing Pokémon Yellow Legacy because I needed some nostalgic comfort food to deal with everything going on right now.” — Beeks

“Just finished up Kevin Can F**k Himself on Netflix. I think it’s a few years old, but man it was so good. I love the storytelling device they employ where any time Kevin is around, it’s filmed as an All In the Family-style sitcom, and the rest of the time it’s filmed like a dark comedy.” — JK

“Been spending a bunch of time on Graze building feeds for BlueSky! They’re really doing some great work for the community, and have made setting up custom feeds super quick, fun and available to pretty much anyone, techie or not.” — Kerha

“I Love Hue Too. It’s been out a while, but it’s beautiful, addictive and a wonderful way to distract from the crumbling world around me.” — Brad

“Last week’s Silo season finale was incredible and I’ve also started Wool (the first in the book series) and it is a really fun read. Crazy how much faster the book is paced – it’s only like 40 percent through the story that [REDACTED] happens!!” — Andy

“I’ve been playing a whole lot of Dragonsweeper, which is like Minesweeper crossed with a dungeon crawler. It’s tricky at first, but it’s sick.” — Sophie

“This playlist of old school Weather Channel songs my brother sent me has been my soundtrack for the last few days. Just sit back and let the nostalgia of trying to get a forecast over basic cable wash over you.” — Mike

At CES a few weeks ago, I was chatting with a new friend on the show floor when he casually referenced “that thing Douglas Adams wrote about the internet.” I stared stupidly back at him. “You know, the Hitchhiker’s Guide guy?” Yeah, no, got that. What internet thing?

Turns out, in 1999, Adams wrote an essay titled “How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet,” and wow does it hold up 26 years later as a way to think about the world we live in now. Here’s just one quote:

“Another problem with the net is that it’s still ‘technology’, and ‘technology’, as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is ‘stuff that doesn’t work yet.’ We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‘crash’ when we tried to use them. Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs (and a couple of decades or so after that, as sheets of paper or grains of sand) and we will cease to be aware of the things.”

I think about this essay damn near every day now. The more things change, the more they stay the same. And maybe we should be comforted by that.