You’ll be able to use an iPhone to wirelessly restore an iPhone 16
Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge
iOS 18 has a new feature that lets you wirelessly restore an iPhone 16 using another iPhone or an iPad, 9to5Mac reports.
9to5Mac says it was able to simulate the new recovery method. “Essentially, when the iPhone 16 enters Recovery Mode for some reason, users can simply place it next to another iPhone or iPad to start the firmware recovery,” according to 9to5Mac. “The other device will download a new iOS firmware and transfer it to the bricked device.”
Apparently, any device on iOS 18 can do the restoration, but only the iPhone 16 lineup of phones can actually be restored using this method. You can already use an iPhone to wirelessly restore an Apple Watch or an Apple TV, so it’s nice to see a similar feature come to the iPhone, too.
California Gov. Newsom Signs Laws Regulating Election A.I. ‘Deepfakes’ The state joins dozens of others in regulating the A.I. fakery in ways that could impact this year’s presidential race.
Trump is hawking tokens for a crypto project he still hasn’t explained
Image: Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images
After a disclaimer that nothing we’d hear tonight is financial or legal advice, followed by a 40-minute interview with former President Donald Trump — which touched on the apparent attempt on his life at a Florida golf course, the border, the “evil forces” conspiring against him, and his granddaughter’s foreign language skills — and subsequent conversations with Trump’s sons and associates, the X Space dedicated to announcing Trump’s “crypto platform” more or less got to the point.
The goal of World Liberty Financial, Trump’s new decentralized finance project, is to drive “the mass adoption of stablecoins and decentralized finance,” according to a statement posted on its X account earlier this month. But over the course of the lengthy “announcement” on Monday night, neither Trump nor any of his business partners explained how exactly that would work.
Finally, more than two hours into the stream, Corey Caplan — the co-founder of the decentralized lending platform Dolomite, who is working as an adviser for Trump’s project — said World Liberty Financial would “sell and otherwise distribute governance tokens called WLFI.” The token sales will be limited to “certain persons who would be eligible to participate in transactions that are exempt from registration under US federal securities law,” meaning only accredited investors under Regulation D and Regulation S can buy the token. Three people with knowledge of the project told the New York Times that World Liberty Financial has been pitched as a borrowing and lending platform.
Earlier in the stream, a bevy of Trump relatives and associates described World Liberty Financial as a way of helping the “huge, approachable class of people who have either been debanked ... or they just don’t have a bank that they can go to, and they don’t have a bank that will listen to them.”
The details started to emerge a little over an hour and a half into the announcement, when two of Trump’s other business partners — Chase Herro and Zak Folkman — revealed some details of the “crypto platform” Trump and his sons have been teasing for over a month. World Liberty Financial will “onboard as many people through simple products where they can actually start to earn yield on their assets,” said Folkman, the co-founder of Dough Finance, a crypto platform that was hacked earlier this year.
Trump first announced the project in August. “For too long, the average American has been squeezed by the big banks and financial elites. It’s time we take a stand—together. #BeDefiant,” he posted on Truth Social. Aside from a link to a Telegram channel, the post included no other details about the platform or what it entailed. The uncertainty around the announcement has let opportunists — and hackers — take advantage of Trump’s fans. Earlier this month, hackers breached the X accounts of Tiffany Trump and Lara Trump, on which they posted links to a fake World Liberty Financial website announcing that the venture had launched.
Donald Trump Jr. and real estate developer and landlord Steve Witkoff, both of whom are also involved in World Liberty Financial, framed the project as a way of helping underserved and unbanked communities.
“If you want to borrow money today, you have to be almost anointed. You have to be a member of the privileged class,” said Witkoff, who in 2017 purchased the Fontainebleau Resort Las Vegas for $600 million.
Don Jr., who described himself as “still a neophyte” in the crypto space, said decentralized finance can help people who have been excluded from traditional financial markets. The announcement played up a popular fear among the crypto crowd: being debanked, potentially as punishment for political dissent.
“There was a time period where the Trumps, we could’ve picked up the phone and called and CEO of any bank,” Don Jr. said. “We went from being people who would have been the elite in that world to just being, like, totally canceled.” It’s possible that cancellation has more to do with Trump’s history of lying about his wealth or running a scammy for-profit college than it does with his political views.
Despite claims that World Liberty Financial will put “the power of finance back in the hands of the people,” initial reports suggested that its founding token would mostly be distributed to people involved in the project. A white paper obtained by CoinDesk said 70 percent of WLFI would be held by the founding members, team, and service providers.
During the stream, however, Caplan chastised the “fake news media” reports of how the token would be distributed and said approximately 63 percent of the tokens will be sold to the public, while 20 percent would be “reserved for team compensation.”
World Liberty Financial appears to be part of a broader Trump outreach campaign to the crypto community. Trump headlined this year’s Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, where he said he’d never sell the US’s Bitcoin holdings but stopped short of promising to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve. He’s also released four NFT collections, which netted him at least $7.2 million, according to August financial disclosure forms.
It’s evident that Trump, who disappeared from the stream after the first 40 minutes, is the face of a product he knows almost nothing about. He had little to say about cryptocurrency aside from some vague comments about the “very hostile environment” the Securities and Exchange Commission has created for the crypto community — and an admission that politicians know that embracing crypto could help them win voters.
“You’re going to be happy, and you’re going to love your crypto, and as long as you have crypto, you’re happy,” Trump said early in the stream. “I think crypto is one of those things we have to do whether we like it or not.”
Donald Trump Rolls Out World Liberty Financial, A New Crypto Venture In a livestream, Mr. Trump formally introduced World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture led by a pair of digital currency enthusiasts with little experience running high-profile businesses.
TikTok faces a skeptical panel of judges in its existential fight against the US government
Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images
TikTok — an app used to by 170 million Americans — now has its future resting in the hands of three judges. The company fought for its life during oral arguments on Monday only for the judges to express a great deal of skepticism towards TikTok’s case.
Attorneys for TikTok and a group of creators suing to block the law popularly known as “the TikTok ban” made their case before a panel of three judges on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. Though the bill seeks a divestment of the app from its Chinese owner ByteDance by a January 19th deadline, the company says the ultimatum is in truth a ban that would stifle the speech of TikTok and its creators, and improperly limit the information Americans are able to receive.
The Department of Justice defended the law, saying that it takes appropriate, targeted action against a company that poses a national security risk because of its alleged exposure to a foreign adversary government. The judges — Obama appointee and Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan, Trump appointee Judge Neomi Rao, and Reagan appointee Judge Douglas Ginsburg — seemed to lob more questions toward counsel for TikTok than the DOJ. During TikTok’s arguments, both Rao and Ginsburg seemed at times to squint or rest a hand on the side of their head. Srinivasan played his cards closest to the chest, directing questions to both sides and nodding along to answers from both.
The DC Circuit is an appeals court that tends to deal with cases involving federal agencies. The fact that the bill is an act of Congress, rather an agency action, was not lost on the judges. Rao told TikTok’s counsel Andrew Pincus that Congress is “not the EPA” and doesn’t have to enact findings like an agency — their findings are borne out by the fact they were able to pass the law. Later, Rao said that many of Pincus’ arguments sounded like he wants the panel to treat Congress “like an agency.”
The judges questioned the practicality of requiring a lesser means of action from TikTok, such as disclosures from the company about their data and content moderation practices. That would depend on trusting the very company the government is worried is a pawn of a covert foreign adversary, Rao and Srinivasan pointed out.
Ginsburg, who didn’t pipe up until toward the end of TikTok’s argument, pushed back on Pincus’ assertion that the law singles out the company. Instead, Ginsburg said, it describes a category of companies controlled by foreign adversaries that could be subject to the law, and specifically names one where there’s an immediate need based on years of government negotiations that have failed to go anywhere.
Jeffrey Fisher, who argued on a behalf of a group of creator plaintiffs, said that upholding the law could ultimately lead to other limits on Americans’ ability to produce for other media companies with foreign owners, from Politico to Spotify to the BBC. Fisher said the content manipulation justifications the government gave — including some lawmakers’ fears about TikTok’s content recommendations around the war in Gaza — “taints the entire act.”
But the judges also questioned whether creators really have a First Amendment interest in who owns TikTok. Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s musings in the recent NetChoice case about how foreign ownership could change the First Amendment calculus also came up, and the judges noted the law is about foreign adversary nations, not just foreign ownership broadly.
Still, the judges also pushed DOJ’s Daniel Tenny on whether the US entity TikTok, Inc. has First Amendment rights. Tenny said it does, but they’re “incidental” in this case because they’re not the target of the law.
The government has sought to show the court certain classified documents while at the same time withholding them from TikTok, because it fears exposing them would further harm the very national security risks the government is worried about. These documents did not come up during the roughly two hours of oral arguments. Instead, the attorneys and judges focused on what level of First Amendment scrutiny should be applied to the case, and how to assess the role of a foreign owner over TikTok.
Kiera Spann, a TikTok creator and petitioner in the suit, told reporters during a press conference after the arguments that she found the platform to be “the least-censored and most authentic source of information,” and said she’s not found the kinds of conversations she’s had on TikTok on other social media platforms. Jacob Huebert, president of Liberty Justice Center which represents separate petitioner BASED Politics, told The Verge outside the courthouse he was “not surprised” the judges had “challenging questions for both sides,” including ones for the DOJ about how far the foreign ownership question could go when it comes to speech. Huebert called it a “mistake” to read too much into the number and type of questions.
An estimated 150 people packed the courtroom Monday to hear from the judges who could decide TikTok’s fate. Whatever the outcome, it can be appealed to the Supreme Court — but the clock is still running out with the January 19th deadline for divestment fast approaching.
Nintendo’s 2024 Switch holiday bundle now includes OLED
Image: Nintendo
The incoming holiday season has some reliable signs, with Christmas songs on the radio, football back on television, and Nintendo Switch bundles with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. If you somehow have avoided the convertible console so far, then this is your chance to get not only the system but also a complimentary subscription to Nintendo Switch Online.
The Mario Kart 8 pack-in is in the form of a digital code, so that’s worth noting if you demand physical media. But otherwise, there’s a little extra value attached to both the standard Switch and Switch OLED without bumping up their sticker prices of $299.99 and $349.99, respectively.
These discounted bundle packs should arrive in stores and online “by October” if you need a new machine to play The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom on once it’s released on September 26th or Donkey Kong Country Returns HD when it arrives in January.
Can satellites spot wildfires before they grow out of control?
Aerial image of a controlled burn. | Image: Google
A Google-backed initiative aims to prevent raging infernos by using satellites that can detect small fires before they grow out of control.
The goal is to launch a constellation of satellites called FireSat into low Earth orbit. It’s a collaboration between a newly founded nonprofit coalition called Earth Fire Alliance and the startup Muon Space, which designs and operates satellite networks. Google.org is funding the project, and Google’s research team is also helping to develop the technology to spot wildfires and monitor their growth from space.
Climate change is setting the stage for more monstrous wildfires as temperatures rise and droughts worsen in many places around the world. That’s why emergency responders and scientists are searching for new tools to help keep communities safe from more intense blazes.
Satellites already gather data used to warn people about large wildfires. The hope is that FireSat can provide more consistent, high-resolution data and spot flames sooner than existing satellites or even people on the ground can.
“There is a significant gap between the data we have available today and what we could have with better satellite coverage. So that’s why Google Research, we teamed up with a bunch of folks, scientists, and leaders in the fire community to develop a new satellite constellation,” Christopher Van Arsdale, lead researcher at Google Research’s Climate and Energy group and a board member for Earth Fire Alliance, said in a press briefing this week.
Fires are often spotted by people or planes first, rather than satellites. Existing satellites that gather data on wildfires might only come by a few times a day or can detect blazes only once they’ve reached a certain size. That makes them harder to use for detecting small fires. If they could gather more granular data, satellites could potentially find blazes in remote places before they reach more populated areas.
With more than 50 satellites dedicated solely to watching wildfires, FireSat is expected to check wildfire activity across the globe every 20 minutes. It’s also supposed to detect fires as small as 5 x 5 meters (the size of a classroom). That’s significantly smaller than earlier satellites, which were able to find blazes two to three acres in size (the size of two football fields), according to Google. To do this, the team behind FireSat developed custom sensors and algorithms to crunch the data using AI. FireSat will be able to quickly compare images of any 5 x 5-meter area over time to recognize a fire and contribute to a global record of fire spread for researchers.
Muon Space is scheduled to launch the first of these satellites in early 2025 and then three more spacecraft in 2026 as part of the first phase of the mission. The Earth Fire Alliance just launched publicly this year, although the technology for FireSat has been under development over the past five years.
“As a former firefighter, I can personally attest to the difference that this will make for firefighters in the field today,” Kate Dargan Marquis, former California state fire marshal and a senior adviser at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation that’s also funding FireSat, said in the press call. “It is a game changer, especially as wildfires are becoming more extreme, more frequent and more dangerous for everyone, information like this will make a life saving difference.”
The AirPods 4 with active noise cancellation are worth springing for compared to the regular pair. Both sound good, but the ANC works surprisingly well — most of the time.
I’ve never been the biggest fan of Apple’s regular AirPods. The first few models didn’t fit my ears securely, I found their sound quality to be adequate at best, and I preferred the noise isolation provided by earbuds with silicone tips. But I fully recognize that large swaths of people love the standard AirPods for their open design and the comfort that comes with it. And after spending a week with the new AirPods 4, I can already tell you that they’re going to be an instant upgrade for many.
From the outside, you won’t spot any drastic changes from the AirPods 3. Apple has continued to tweak the shape and contours of the earbuds for the best possible fit, and the charging case is now smaller than ever. (And yes, it’s got a USB-C connector this time.) But these still look the part of AirPods — and they still only come in white.
Bigger changes await inside: for the first time, Apple is offering two different versions of the regular AirPods. Both deliver the same sound quality, so don’t worry about that. And each contains the company’s H2 chip, which powers several new features that boost sound quality and voice call clarity. They’re also both IP54 dust and water resistant. The base AirPods 4 cost $129, and the more premium model is priced at $179. For the extra money, you get a few key upgrades, with the headlining differentiator being active noise cancellation.
So let’s start right there. How well can ANC possibly work in an open-style design that doesn’t fully seal into your ears? This isn’t the first time it’s been attempted — Samsung’s Galaxy Buds 3 also included noise cancellation — and the way it works is basically the same as with the AirPods Pro. The microphones on the AirPods 4 analyze your environment and generate anti-noise to dial down ambient loudness. But with other earbuds, ANC gets a helping hand from the natural noise isolation of ear tips. That’s not the case here, so you’ve got to go in with realistic expectations. There are no miracles. The AirPods Pro are capable of much more comprehensive noise cancellation, full stop. If you want a private bubble of tranquility, the AirPods 4 aren’t going to take you there.
But I’ve been genuinely impressed by what they are capable of. If you just put the AirPods 4 in and turn on noise cancellation without any audio playing, you might not be wowed. You’ll hear… well, absolutely everything — but the din is less overwhelming. The ANC is best at tackling lower-frequency noises from airplane cabins, city traffic, and those random hums at many offices. The AirPods 4 even did a fairly remarkable job of cutting down the rumble of ferry engines at the pier near our office.
The design has been tweaked but remains similar to the third-gen AirPods.
You’re always going to hear a fair amount of ambient sound if you’re not listening to something, but once the music starts, that’s where the ANC proves its worth. I’ve found that I can keep the volume at around 50 percent and barely notice any distractions. With past AirPods (and with the non-ANC AirPods 4), I routinely find myself cranking the volume to combat my surroundings. You won’t need to face that battle with the AirPods 4 with ANC, and that means you should be listening at safer levels more often than not. One unfortunate downgrade compared to the AirPods Pro is that you can’t adjust volume directly on the earbuds; there are no swipe gestures like on Apple’s flagship buds.
The AirPods 4 aren’t going to get any of the hearing health features coming to the AirPods Pro, but their ability to shave off enough of the outside world to let you keep the volume slider at a sensible spot is a major reason to consider upgrading. There are definitely environments where they can struggle — the ANC didn’t put up much of a fight in a crowded bar — but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how useful the feature has proven in this open-ear style.
Along with noise cancellation, the higher-end model gets transparency mode and Adaptive Audio, a feature that blends the two so that important noises like sirens can pass through. Adaptive Audio is less useful here than on the AirPods Pro since the AirPods 4 always make it easy to hear what’s happening around you by nature of their design. But Conversation Awareness, which lowers the audio volume when you start talking, remains a helpful trick — unless you have a habit of muttering things to yourself like I often do.
The active noise cancellation works well enough to help you keep the volume at a reasonable level — even on city streets.
There are other perks included with the higher-end $179 AirPods 4. The case supports wireless charging either with Apple’s MagSafe pucks or any Qi-compatible charger. And there’s also a built-in speaker on the case that can emit a sound when you’re trying to track it down with Apple’s Find My app. The standard $129 AirPods 4 lack these features. I’m fine losing the speaker, but having to go without wireless charging in the base model stings and meaningfully takes away from their value.
As ever, the AirPods 4 still only come in white.
Sound-wise, these are Apple’s best regular AirPods yet. The overall sound signature hasn’t changed much from the AirPods 3, but the AirPods 4 provide a thicker layer of bass than their predecessors; I’ve noticed greater instrument separation when listening to songs like “Tiny Moves” by Bleachers; there’s more finesse and clarity to the upper range / treble. The AirPods Pro maintain a leg up when it comes to overall fidelity, but I’d have no issues living with the AirPods 4. And again, the regular and ANC models are identical in this department.
I still have to be intentional and twist these AirPods into my ears just right if I want them to stay put. But once they’re in, they’re fairly snug, even when I’m rushing down the subway station stairs to catch a train. With the AirPods Pro, I can just sort of cram them in without giving it any thought. But even I can admit that the AirPods 4 are more comfortable over long listening sessions.
Both the earbuds and case offer IP54 resistance against dust and water.
Head gestures are a new capability you get with both sets of the AirPods 4. When toggled on, you can respond to Siri by nodding your head up and down to engage with notifications or answer a call; shaking your head side to side will also dismiss them. I’m not someone who likes having my earbuds pester me with notifications, but in my brief tests, my head movements were detected accurately, even when they were fairly small. Some people might really come to like this way of dealing with Siri, but I’ll be sticking with the more traditional methods.
Anyone who frequently uses their AirPods for voice calls will appreciate the Voice Isolation feature — already available on the AirPods Pro — that has now come to the AirPods 4. By running machine learning algorithms simultaneously on the AirPods and source device, Apple can better isolate your voice, even in raucous environments. This is basically akin to Google’s Clear Calling feature, and it can make a significant difference if you need to take a call in less-than-ideal conditions. Note that Voice Isolation is only available on calls and can’t be used when, say, you’re recording a voice memo or a video with your phone.
On top of these new features, you get the usual slew of Apple ecosystem tie-ins like audio sharing, automatic switching between devices, hands-free “Hey Siri” commands, Apple TV integration, and more. I still very much wish that Apple would include genuine multipoint support so you could pair to two products at once, but at this point, the decision to leave it out seems like a philosophical choice that’s not going to change.
The AirPods 4 with ANC will be a tempting upgrade for many. The regular AirPods 4? Maybe less so.
Battery life is rated at four hours of playback time with noise cancellation or five hours with it off. Add in the charging case and you get a total of 20 and 30 hours, respectively. (The cheaper AirPods 4 obviously get the longer numbers since there’s no ANC.) I haven’t used them long enough to extensively verify those estimates, but they’ve seemed on point so far. Sadly, Apple still hasn’t made repairability a priority with the AirPods 4, so inevitably, there will come a time when that endurance starts to wane.
I’ll be going right back to regular earbuds after this review. That’s just who I am, and I like having as much noise isolation as possible. But the AirPods 4 with ANC are far and away Apple’s most compelling take on this open design yet. The noise cancellation isn’t on par with more expensive in-ear alternatives, but it’s easily good enough to ensure you can enjoy your music at a normal volume no matter where you might be. You can tell a difference when the ANC is working, which I can’t say of other open earbuds that have advertised noise cancellation. That, combined with the wireless charging, is the biggest reason I’d steer most people toward the more expensive model.
The standard AirPods 4 give you the same good audio performance, and they effortlessly weave into Apple’s ecosystem. They’re also a substantial upgrade over the second-gen model that they’ve replaced for the same $129, but beyond the walled garden tricks, Apple left them with relatively few frills compared to the ANC pair. So unless you’re very price-conscious, it’s worth stepping up. Your ears will be supremely grateful you spent the extra $50.
Will TikTok Be Banned in January? That Question is Headed to Court TikTok will be in federal court on Monday, aiming to block a new law that will ban the popular video app in the United States early next year.
Flappy Bird’s original creator says he has nothing to do with the new game
The new take on Flappy Bird will include alternate game modes. | Screenshot: The Flappy Bird Foundation
Last week, The Flappy Bird Foundation announced a game called Flappy Bird. But while the group has been framing it as the triumphant return of a classic mobile game, Flappy Bird’s original developer, Dong Nguyen isn’t calling it a comeback — in fact, he says he’s not involved at all.
Nguyen posted as much on X (for the first time since 2017!) this morning, saying he didn’t “sell anything.” The Flappy Bird Foundation wrote in the announcement it shared with press last week that it had “acquired the rights from Gametech Holdings, LLC,” which had secured the trademark from Nguyen, but it doesn’t appear as though that was the result of any dealings between him and the group.
No, I have no related with their game. I did not sell anything.
I also don't support crypto.
Gametech filed in opposition of Nguyen’s Flappy Bird trademark in 2023, spotted X user Samperson. The filing came nearly a decade after Nguyen pulled the then-popular game and never released another version, and the US Patent and Trademark Office determined his trademark to be abandoned, terminating his claim to it in January.
The Flappy Bird Foundation didn’t say in its announcement that Nguyen was involved, but it certainly leans on nostalgia as it promotes the game. More than half of the game’s first trailer lingers on the game’s rise in popularity and the disappointment of its abrupt disappearance in 2013, before declaring that “In 2024, Flappy Bird will fly again.”
As for the crypto piece of this puzzle, cybersecurity researcher Varun Biniwale pointed out hidden pages from the Flappy Bird website that indicate there may be such a component in the game’s launch. One page that seems to have been removed (and is archived here) said Flappy Bird will “fly higher than ever on Solana as it soars into web 3.0,” and invited players to “build, create, play and stake to own.”
For now, Flappy Bird is listed as coming soon for iOS and Android. Just don’t expect it to be the Flappy Bird you knew — that, it seems, remains as gone as ever.
The great Evernote reboot
Image: Samar Haddad / The Verge
For so many years, the Evernote elephant was a truly iconic logo. Evernote was one of the first productivity apps to embrace smartphones, to enable cross-platform sync, and to make it really easy to store and create almost anything. And so Evernote was huge.
But Peak Evernote was roughly a decade ago. Since then, the product has often felt stagnant (or worse), the company churned through executives and business plans, and it seemed like Evernote was slowly turning into a zombie app. Not gone, not even forgotten, just sort of... there.
In 2022, when Bending Spoons acquired the company and soon after laid off nearly all its staff, millions of Evernote users were confused about what the future held for the tool they had relied on for so long. Things got even worse when the company went essentially silent for months. But since then, the narrative and pace around Evernote has shifted pretty dramatically. In 2024 in particular, Evernote has shipped a laundry list of new features, retooled its design, added some core new functionality, and made the app begin to feel modern again. With all that change has come a shift in price, too — and not everyone’s thrilled.
On this episode of The Vergecast, the third and final installment in our series about productivity and digital life, we sit down with Federico Simionato, the Evernote product lead at Bending Spoons. We talk about the acquisition process, how he perceives Evernote in today’s landscape, what it took to start shipping new stuff again, why Bending Spoons changed the subscription price, and much more.
We also talk about the future of Evernote, and productivity tools in general. Evernote is more than two decades old, and is as such filled with old ideas about what people want and how they want to use it. Simionato and his team are tasked with figuring out how AI fits into Evernote, how the product should integrate with all the other tools that now exist, and turning Evernote into something that works for the old users and appeals to new ones.
If you want to know more about the things we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started:
The fanciest game console you can buy
Image: David Pierce / The Verge
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 52, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, I swear I don’t always just share absurdly expensive gadgets, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
I also have for you some expensive but excellent new gadgets, a couple of great new tech podcasts, the best pause music ever, a new game that will take over your weekend, and much more. Let’s dig in.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you into right now? What should everyone else be watching, reading, playing, building, buying, or singing in the car? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, tell them to subscribe here.)
The Drop
The PS5 Pro. I can’t imagine spending $700 on any game console, let alone one with no disc drive. That said, I do love the idea of flying around in Spider-Man 2 — the only game I love to just aimlessly explore for hours at a time – with perfect graphics at blistering frame rates. Technically this isn’t up for preorder for a couple of weeks, but I’m sharing it now because we’re all going to need to start saving money ASAP.
The AirPods 4 with ANC. I’m sure the iPhone 16 is fine, but to my mind, this is the most exciting thing Apple launched this week — a set of open-ear headphones with decent noise cancellation is a rare and exciting thing. (The AirPods Pro hearing aid stuff is also extremely cool.)
The Huawei Mate XT.This is the phone of the week. I can’t stop watching the video of the trifold, which gives intense Westworld tablet vibes, in the best possible way. You probably can’t buy it, and at $2,800, you probably wouldn’t want to anyway, but I love that this thing exists.
Will & Harper. I keep hearing great things about this doc, in which Will Ferrell and Harper Steele drive across the country and try to make sense of their relationship after Steele came out as trans. There’s a great New York Times interview with them about the process, too.
Channels with Peter Kafka. Nobody does insidery tech media pods like Kafka, so I was psyched to see him back on the digital airwaves once again. (I guess, disclosure, he’s making the show with Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company.) The first episode, with New Yorker editor David Remnick, was a good one.
Panic World. Another great new podcast! Ryan Broderick writes one of my absolute favorite newsletters about the internet, Garbage Day, and the first episode of the podcast has the same “smart but borderline unhinged” vibe to it. It’s delightful.
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2. I’m a pretty simple gamer. I like games where I get to battle with and / or against cool robots, and I love when everything is needlessly intense and gory. All of which is to say, I’m confident I will find the latest Warhammer installment utterly ridiculous and delightful — just as everyone else seems to.
“Goldeneye Watch Music.” This song is 100 percent guaranteed to be on my Spotify Wrapped this year, just based on this week alone. The epic pause music from an all-time great game is now six minutes long, super high-def, and constantly on repeat while I work.
iFixit’s FixHub Smart Soldering Iron. I trust The Verge’s Sean Hollister completely when it comes to techie DIY, and he loves iFixit’s super-portable, super-simple tool for all things liquid metal. It’s not cheap, but it sounds like a heck of a lot of fun.
Chrome Tab Groups on iOS. A tiny but really welcome browser upgrade: you can now sync tab groups from your computer to your iPhone. (It already worked on Android.) Tab management on mobile is generally trash, and tab groups are a really good, not-quite-bookmarks way to keep things in order.
Screen share
When I mentioned a couple of months ago how much I liked Andrew Bosworth’s idea of “Inbox Ten,” which focuses on ending every day not finished with everything but in a manageable place, I heard from a bunch of you who liked the approach, too. Bosworth’s system is simple and straightforward but also a good way to keep a lot of things in order.
When he’s not a productivity blogger, Bosworth (everybody calls him Boz) is the CTO of Meta. He’s been there a hair shy of two decades and right now seems to spend a lot of his time thinking about AI, AR, headsets, the metaverse, and apparently all of the other 60 million things Meta is up to these days.
I asked Boz to share his homescreen to see how he manages it all and what else he might be thinking about. Here’s Boz’s homescreen — he’s a company man! — plus some info on the apps he uses and why:
The phone: I actually have two phones, an Android and an iPhone; my work phone is an Android, and that’s where I have beta versions of our apps to dogfood. I’ve always been into smaller phone form factors, so I’m currently using a Motorola Razr Plus for work, but I did have to go in for the iPhone 15 Pro because I love the wide-angle camera.
The wallpaper: My lockscreen is a composite of photos I took of the solar eclipse in 2017. My homescreen wallpaper is a valley oak that is special to my wife and me, at the property in Carmel Valley where we got married.
The apps: Savant, Alarm.com, Authy, 1Password, Siedle, Unity Video, Find My, Clock, Tidal, Asana, Noom, Settings, Mercedes Me Connect, Bill, Meta Horizon, Meta View, Messages, Phone, Camera, Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, Threads, Instagram, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Safari.
Definitely a one-screen guy so I try to keep all my most used apps on one screen with no folders. If they aren’t there, I just search for them.
My homescreen is more or less apps by frequency of use, with the apps at the bottom left used most often and toward the top right used less often. Communication roughly in the lower-left segment, home things upper left, media lower right, and miscellaneous upper right.
I also asked Boz to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he sent back:
I also collect and shoot with rare or unusual lenses and am in the early stages of building my own lens, but still very much in the design phase, and this will likely take me a while to execute.
I have young kids, so a lot of my time revolves around transporting them to various activities and locations, but I really enjoy the time I spend with them and the people who support them in all their myriad pursuits.
I’ve got glasses on the mind — I’ve been talking about the challenges we’ve overcome building our first working AR glasses prototype, and I’m very excited about them, as is Mark [Zuckerberg]. We’ve seen the success and appeal of displayless smart glasses with AI built into them with the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, and the prototype we’ve built is on the other end of that spectrum, where you now also have a wide FOV display in a true glasses form factor. That, coupled one day with always-on sensors and contextualized AI, will be a game-changer for personal computing, and we can’t wait to share more on that work in the coming weeks.
Crowdsourced
Here’s what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now as well! Emailinstaller@theverge.comor 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 tothis post on Threads.
“I’ve recently picked up a pair of the brand-new IK Multimedia MTM MKII studio monitors, and I am BLOWN AWAY by the quality of the sound. They’ve got to be the best-sounding ‘desk-friendly’ studio audio monitors available. They literally make me giddy by how full and rich and accurate they sound.” – Brooks
“I’m giving Mammoth a try, and it’s quickly becoming my favorite Mastodon client. It does a good job of combining the firehose with curated and algorithmic feeds. And the UI is nice.” – Joseph
“I’m running out of iCloud space at 200GB. I have 18,500 files in my Photos app, but Apple provides no way to tell which are larger. Turns out, the trial of the PowerPhotos Mac app lets you sort by size while your photos are still in the cloud! In my case, just 500 files take up 100GB. That’s honestly totally feasible to sort through manually and will give me back 50 percent of my storage!” – Nikolaj
“After the recent ebook versus paper book debate on The Vergecast, I wanted to point to Reader, Come Home by Maryanne Wolf. It’s a really fascinating dive into how digital reading affects the brain — with the latter half focused on childhood exposure. Definitely an important consideration!” – Brad
“No Rolls Barred, especially “Monopoly, but Communist.” The channel is all about playing board games, and they will also do classic games, but they add some rules or use the board game as a base and essentially make a completely new game that you can kind of relate to the original (“Monopoly, but Communist,” for example).” – Anthony
“Atlas Creed is a new indie author that I really enjoy. He self-published a crime thriller with some supernatural elements called Armitage, and it’s surprisingly killer. I listened to the audiobook, and the narrators do a great job! Not terribly important, but the inside cover for the hardcover is sick, too.” – Steve
“‘How to Monetize a Blog.’ Maybe read this article / commentary / art piece / disaster on desktop instead of mobile? It’s worth it.” – Hunter
“While reading the most recent issue, I thought of a video essay YouTube channel that I want to recommend. The channel is called Summoning Salt. It focuses on the history and techniques used to obtain world records in various video games. The videos are captivating, and the narrator does a fantastic job of keeping your attention. I highly recommend it.” – Grant
“After a successful playtest, friends and I have had our first session of Daggerheart this week. It’s a TTRPG, like D&D, from the folks at Critical Role. The mechanics are simpler, and it focuses on collaborative storytelling and quick decisions. It feels much lighter to play and it’s less load on the DM! Highly recommended for newbies, too!” – René
“I don’t usually buy new games at full price, but Astro Bot is awesome!” – Sam
Signing off
Sometimes I find myself in a brand-new corner of YouTube. Sometimes it’s like, “Oh, of course there are tons of people doing cool gardening tutorials on YouTube!” But sometimes, like what happened to me recently, it’s a total surprise. I’ve spent a lot of the last week or so on what I guess you’d call “Short Film YouTube” — it’s just an endless supply of short, simple movies on every topic and story you can imagine: horror flicks; inspirational shorts; extremely meta stories; action movies; stories about coffee runs with big-twist endings; student films; more student films; so many student films. I don’t know how I never thought to look for this before, but this is now my go-to way to relax when I have a few minutes to kill. And if you’ve never seen “Nothing, except everything,” you should. It’s a Short Film YouTube classic.
Megalopolis could have let audiences ask Adam Driver questions during showings
Adam Driver in a Megalopolis trailer. | Screenshot: YouTube
Francis Ford Coppola wanted voice recognition software to let audience members ask Adam Driver’s Cesar character a question during theatrical showings of Megalopolis, according to a Telegraph interview with the director. Then, the software would trigger the theater’s projector to play a clip of “the most relevant response” from Driver.
Apparently, it was actually in the works. Amazon had agreed to make a “custom version of its Alexa voice-recognition software” to do this, but the team working on it was laid off during a huge round of layoffs in 2022, writes The Telegraph. Alas.
“Imagine!” Coppola beams. “You could see Megalopolis five times in its opening week and it would be different each time! It would have been the future of the movies and ancient theatre rolled into one!”
Coppola apparently almost completely abandoned the idea, when Driver suggested preserving one of those responses to answer a pre-determined question from an usher. Most of us won’t see it in our local theaters, but it will happen in “some cinemas for its UK release,” according to The Telegraph. It also played out at some Megalopolis festival screenings. Here’s an abridged version of Vogue’s recounting of one such event.
Somewhere in the middle of the film, as Driver’s Cesar is speaking to camera, the screen briefly went blank. There was a confused smattering of applause from those who thought it was all over—if only we’d been so lucky—but then, with the lights still down, a man ran onto the stage in front of the cinema screen from the wings, holding a long microphone.
...Positioning himself on one side of the stage, and now lit by a spotlight, the man then faced Driver, now back on screen, and asked him a question, as if participating in some strange pandemic-era Zoom press conference. Driver answered, and the man then rushed off stage again. It was so odd, and felt so completely pointless, that I didn’t know how to respond.
This is a great AI voice recorder, and it’s totally doomed
You can wear the NotePin or clip it almost anywhere — which is pretty much its whole appeal. | Image: Plaud
Kudos to Plaud for one thing: in a year otherwise marred by high-profile failures and oh so much AI vaporware, it made an AI gadget that does exactly what it claims to do and does it pretty well. The gadget is called the NotePin, and it’s a $169, pill-shaped voice recorder that can transcribe, summarize, and pull important information out of your audio. This is something current AI systems can actually do well! There’s good and mature tech at every step along the pipeline here, from tiny microphones to speech-to-text transcription to natural-language processing and AI summarization. The NotePin does it well.
But the reason the NotePin works is also the reason I wouldn’t recommend buying one. AI voice recording is great and handy and being commoditized at an absolutely blistering pace. With iOS 18 or macOS Sequoia, you get transcriptions and summarization built into the Voice Memos app. Google’s Pixel Recorder app is terrific and is built into both the Pixel phones and the Pixel Watch. You can also get similar features from lots of apps. Do you need a dedicated voice recorder?
This is, of course, the eternal question about AI assistants as a whole. Are they a feature of your existing devices or a gadget category unto themselves? Plaud’s argument for dedicated hardware is about the same as all the other AI startups: that ease of use is everything. The NotePin’s accessories are core to its appeal: there’s a braided lanyard so you can wear it around your neck, a wristband so you can wear it Fitbit-style on your arm, and a clip so you can put it almost anywhere else.
In my time testing the NotePin, I’ve mostly had it around my neck, and I’ve used it to note reminders while driving, ramble long ideas to myself while walking the dog, and summarize calls and conversations. It’s certainly handy being able to just reach down, press the NotePin until it vibrates to indicate it’s recording, and then yammer away at nothing while my necklace dutifully listens. Once, when I was particularly enjoying a podcast, I just played the whole thing on speaker so the NotePin would transcribe and summarize it. The NotePin is easier to access than my phone in my pocket, and it’s definitely simpler than holding my wrist in front of my mouth for minutes at a time while shouting into my watch. The form factor definitely matters.
The NotePin’s mic is perfectly fine: the audio it records never sounds amazing, but in every realistic scenario I tried, it was good enough for solid transcription. Plaud estimates the device’s battery lasts for about 18 hours of recording or 30 days of standby time, and in my testing, I’ve done about four hours of recording over about 10 days, and the battery just hit “Low.” The NotePin charges on a tiny pad, which I’m confident I’m going to lose very soon, and I wish it was just a simple USB-C plug. But look: the thing works. It does what it says on the tin.
Screenshots: David Pierce / The Verge
Plaud’s transcriptions and summaries are mostly pretty good! But that’s just not enough.
The major problem with the NotePin, and frankly every other AI gadget, is that it’s not useful enough on the other side. Once you’ve made some recordings with the NotePin, you import them into the Plaud app, which is relatively quick and simple. But then you have to go into each recording and manually tell the app to transcribe it, pick a “template” you want to use for how it’s summarized, and then come back a few minutes later to see what it came up with. (You get 300 monthly minutes of transcriptions and basic templates for free, or for $80 a year, you get 1,200 and more templates and features.) That’s too much busy work. Plus, how much effort am I really saving if I have to pull out my phone — twice! — anyway?
The transcriptions are good, and the summaries are helpful, and so far, I haven’t had any huge mistakes or hallucinations. But once they’re done, they just live in reverse-chronological order in the Plaud app. The app correctly noted that one of my recordings was a reminder to buy retinol; it didn’t remind me of anything. It just made the title “Reminder to buy retinol.” When I wandered my kitchen speaking a grocery list into the NotePin, the app accurately transcribed that list for me but just titled the note “Grocery List with Various Food Items and Household Essentials.”
It’s not really the NotePin’s fault that it can’t do more than turn my nonsensical ramblings into text files. It’s not Plaud’s fault, either. It’s just that what I really want — and what should really happen — is for it to take that grocery list and add it to the grocery list I already have on my phone. It should add that reminder to my to-do list. At the very least, the app should be able to combine my grocery list note with my other grocery list note, but it can’t do that, either. Ultimately, no matter what you’re recording, odds are you want to do something with it afterward, and Plaud simply can’t do most of those things. Eventually, the Plaud app just began to feel like another inbox I needed to check.
All that is why your phone or smartwatch might be insurmountable foes in the AI assistant wars. They might be marginally less convenient — you have to pull it out of your pocket instead of just reaching down to your chest — but they’re far more connected with the rest of your digital life. Building your whole world around a transcription app just doesn’t make any sense.
It’s possible, over time, that these things could become more open. Apple and Google could open up APIs that allow AI assistants to interact with the other apps on your phone, or theoretically, the assistants could get smart enough to just interact with the apps on your behalf. Lots of developers are working on both options. But as it stands right now, the Plauds and Humanes and Rabbits of the world just can’t do enough. AI voice recorders are a great idea — but they’re not a new kind of gadget.
TikTok is about to get its day in court
Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo from Getty Images
Next week, a court will hear arguments about whether the US government can ban TikTok, based on evidence it doesn’t want anyone — including the social media company — to see.
On September 16th, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia will hear oral arguments for TikTok v. Garland, TikTok’s First Amendment challenge to legislation that it claims amounts to a ban. It’s a fight not just about free speech but whether the Department of Justice can make a case using classified material that its opponent can’t review or argue against. The government argues TikTok is a clear national security threat but says that revealing why would be a threat, too.
“I think the courts are going to tread very carefully here,” Matt Schettenhelm, a senior litigation analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence covering tech and telecom, told The Verge. “Especially in a First Amendment case like this, where it’s effectively banning one of our leading platforms for free speech in the country, the idea that you’re going to do it for secret reasons that you don’t even tell the company itself, that is going to be cause for concern for the judges.”
The DOJ’s case against TikTok
TikTok’s suit stems from a law signed by President Joe Biden back in April. The law requires TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to divest it within nine months to a non-Chinese company; if it fails, the app would be effectively banned in the US — unless the president grants it a few months to get a deal done. TikTok has argued the law would unconstitutionally “force a shutdown,” accusing the government of taking “the unprecedented step of expressly singling out and banning TikTok.”
In filings first submitted on July 28th, the government laid out its defense, making a series of declarations about TikTok’s risks. The claims relied on dozens of pages of redacted classified material. The DOJ insisted it wasn’t “trying to litigate in secret,” but, citing national security concerns, it asked to file the classified material ex parte, meaning only one side (and the panel of judges) would be able to see it.
We obviously don’t know exactly what’s in these documents, but the partially redacted filings give us some hints. They focus largely on the potential that the Chinese government could compel ByteDance to hand over the data of US users — or that it could coerce the company into using TikTok’s algorithm to push specific content onto US users.
The government argues that the national security risks posed by TikTok are so significant that they override First Amendment claims. The DOJ said Congress decided to ban TikTok based on “extensive information — including substantial classified information — on the national-security risk” of allowing TikTok to remain operational in the US.
One of the documents is a declaration from Casey Blackburn, an assistant director of national intelligence. Blackburn writes that there is “no information” that the Chinese government has used TikTok for “malign foreign influence targeting US persons” or the “collection of sensitive data of US persons.” But he says there is “a risk” of it happening in the future.
Another declaration comes from Kevin Vorndran, an assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division. Vorndran details the possibility that TikTok may be a “hybrid commercial threat”: a business whose legitimate activity serves as a backdoor through which foreign governments can access US data, infrastructure, and technologies. He states that the Chinese government uses “prepositioning tactics” as part of a “broader geopolitical and long-term strategy to undermine US national security.” These efforts, the government claims, “span several years of planning and implementation.”
In other words, the government is arguing that even if China hasn’t yet surveilled TikTok’s US users, it could. It takes particular issue with TikTok’s ability to access users’ contacts, location, and other data that it says could potentially let the Chinese government track Americans. The DOJ notes that researchers can easily identify individuals using anonymized data bundles, making “anonymized” data anything but.
The filings argue that TikTok’s recommendation algorithm could also be used to influence US users. TikTok’s “heating” feature lets employees “manually boost certain content,” potentially at the direction of the Chinese government. Lawmakers from both parties have accused TikTok of promoting content critical of Israel. In a private meeting with the group No Labels, Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) suggested that college campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war were proof that students are being “manipulated by certain groups or entities or countries.” And Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL), the ranking member of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, told TheNew York Times in April that the Israel-Hamas war was a factor in the eagerness of legislators to regulate TikTok.
The hardest evidence for any of this isn’t public, though. Blackburn’s declaration includes an eight-page section titled “ByteDance and TikTok’s History of Censorship and Content Manipulation at PRC Direction,” for instance, but it’s almost entirely redacted.
The DOJ filings also reveal — and simultaneously obscure — the lengthy, extensive negotiations that preceded the ban. ByteDance and TikTok executives met with representatives from several agencies starting in August 2022, discussing ways to address security concerns without divestment. By March 2023, the government believed divestment was the only option. And in February 2024, Congress began holding briefings about its potential threats.
During these hearings, lawmakers discussed the threats China poses to US national security, formal and informal methods of control the Chinese government exerts over companies that do business there, and the specifics of China’s control over ByteDance.
But the briefing transcripts are largely redacted — including one section discussing an additional unknown issue. “We never see what the lawmakers actually decided, or what actually drove their decision,” Schettenhelm said. “There’s sort of a missing piece here: how much did the lawmakers consider this a true threat, and why did they need to take this extreme step as opposed to less drastic measures?”
TikTok fights back
TikTok contends that the government’s defense is full of errors, including what it calls “false assertions” about what data it stores and where. It says it does not store users’ precise locations and claims information from users’ contact lists “is automatically anonymized” and “cannot be used to recover the original contact information” of people who aren’t on TikTok. TikTok says that contrary to claims its anonymized data isn’t anonymous, the proposed agreement required anonymization tools “often used by the US government to protect sensitive data.”
The company also denies that the Chinese government can access the data of American users or influence its algorithm. It says US user data and TikTok’s “US recommendation engine” are stored in the United States with Oracle, thanks to a $1.5 billion siloing effort dubbed Project Texas. But reports have suggested TikTok employees in the US continued to report to ByteDance executives in Beijing after the plan’s implementation, and one former employee described the effort as “largely cosmetic.”
Still, TikTok argues the government’s claims about its operations are largely false. TikTok says that the government ignored its extensive, detailed plan to address national security concerns — and that the information the DOJ has provided fails to prove why a ban was necessary.
Schettenhelm, the Bloomberg Intelligence legal expert, said Congress’ decision to single out a single company is unique. TikTok argues it’s also unlawful. The Constitution prohibits what are known as “bill of attainder laws,” which single out an individual or company without due process. The bill bans social media websites and apps controlled by “foreign adversaries” that meet certain criteria — including having more than 1 million monthly active users and letting users generate content — but TikTok is the only company it mentions by name. The court will have to decide who’s right.
The government “never really explains why TikTok is subject to that different process, and I think when you do something so unique like that, especially when the First Amendment is implicated, I think the courts are going to want to see more of a justification,” Schettenhelm said.
TikTok’s uncertain future
A decision will likely come in December, where the court could either uphold the law’s constitutionality or block it from going into effect. But it won’t necessarily put an end to the legal saga. If the court rules in favor of the government and upholds the law, TikTok has multiple avenues through which it could appeal, Schettenhelm told The Verge. It could ask for an en banc decision in which all the judges in the DC Circuit Court examine the decision. TikTok could also appeal the case and ask the Supreme Court to overturn the decision.
But Schettenhelm predicts that the court could block the law from taking effect because it’s unable to determine whether it’s constitutional. “I think that potentially could have the effect of throwing it back to Congress, and Congress could go ahead at taking another shot,” Schettenhelm said. “Congress would have to pass a second law, and the president would have to sign it.”
Given that the initial bill passed with an overwhelming bipartisan consensus, a subsequent bill could pass easily. But the outcome of the election could determine whether the law goes into effect. Former President Donald Trump — who previously attempted to ban TikTok — said in March that he now opposes efforts to ban the app.
If the court rules against TikTok, the clock will keep ticking toward its divestment date — when one of the biggest social media platforms in the country could disappear.
The best Android phones for everyone
Image: The Verge
Whether you want everything but the kitchen sink or top-tier performance for a midrange price, you’ve got options.
The Android ecosystem is all about choice. While iPhone owners have a smaller pool of new devices to pick from when it’s time to upgrade, there’s a much wider range of choices on Android. You want incredible camera zoom? A built-in stylus? A phone that runs a complete desktop environment when you plug it into a monitor? You can find it on Android. Heck, you can find all of that in a single device.
On the flip side, all that choice can make for some hard decisions. Here’s where I’d like to help; I’ve tested a whole boatload of recent Android phones, and I think there are some real winners in the current batch. It’s all a matter of what you’re looking for, what you’re comfortable spending, and what your definition of a “reasonably sized phone” is. (I have my own, personally.)
As you sift through the options, you’ll almost certainly come across tech’s favorite buzzphrase of the year: AI. Generally speaking, AI has yet to really impress me on a phone. The Pixel 9 series has some potentially useful features, like a new Screenshots app that uses AI to tag relevant info in metadata, and Galaxy devices can translate a phone call for you in real time. These things are nothing to sneeze at! But none of it feels like the platform shift that the big tech companies keep promising. Best not to put too much stock in any company’s AI claims just yet.
If you live in the US, I have some bad news about the Android market, though. For complicated reasons having to do with “capitalism” and “geopolitics,” we don’t get nearly as many of the options as you’ll find in Asia and Europe — brands like Huawei, Xiaomi, Honor, and Oppo just aren’t available here. I’ve limited this guide to the devices I’ve personally tested in depth; thus, it is a fairly US-centric set of recommendations.
With that in mind, it’s also worth acknowledging that most people in the US get their phones “for free” from their wireless carrier. If you can manage it, buying a phone unlocked will give you the most flexibility and freedom if you end up wanting to change carriers in the near future. Phone manufacturers also offer financing and trade-in deals to make payment more manageable. But if you’re happy with your carrier and the free phone on offer is the one you really want, by all means, take the free phone. Just make sure you understand the terms, especially if you need to change plans to cash in on the deal.
However you go about it, you have some fantastic options for your next Android phone.
The best Android phone overall
Screen:6.3-inch 1080p 120Hz OLED /Processor:Tensor G4 /Cameras:50-megapixel f/1.7 main with OIS, 48-megapixel ultrawide, 10.5-megapixel selfie /Battery:4,700mAh /Charging:27W wired, 15W wireless (with Pixel Stand 2) /Weather resistance:IP68
Google’s hardware is better than ever, and the whole Pixel 9 lineup feels just as polished as anything you’d get from Samsung or Apple. But at $799, the basic Pixel 9 is in a particularly appealing position, and if you don’t need a telephoto camera or the biggest screen, then this is the Android phone to get.
The Pixel 9 comes with some significant quality-of-life improvements like a faster fingerprint scanner for unlocking the phone. The camera is as reliable as ever, and if you’re into AI photo editing tricks, boy does this phone have ‘em. There’s a new Screenshots app that acts as a place to store all of the information that would otherwise be lost at sea in your camera roll, and it uses AI to parse information out and make it searchable. Kinda handy.
Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge
You gotta admit, the camera bar is a strong look.
Even without AI, this is an excellent phone. It’s also designed to go the distance, with seven years of promised OS updates, which very likely means you’ll outgrow the phone before Google stops supporting it. Its potential for long-term value and the quality of the hardware make it an easy recommendation for anyone who just wants a nice Android phone that works.
Screen:6.8-inch 1440p 120Hz OLED /Processor:Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 /Cameras:200-megapixel main with OIS, 50-megapixel 5x telephoto with OIS, 10-megapixel 3x telephoto with OIS, 12-megapixel ultrawide, 12-megapixel selfie /Battery:5,000mAh /Charging:45W wired, 15W wireless /Weather resistance:IP68
The Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra says it all in the name: Ultra. It has everything you could ask for in a phone — well, at least one that doesn’t fold in half. There’s a stylus, two telephoto cameras, a massive battery, and one of the best ding dang screens on any phone, anywhere.
Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge
Write your grocery list in style.
So why am I a little underwhelmed? For starters, Samsung swapped last year’s 10x telephoto camera for a higher-resolution 5x camera that uses in-sensor crop to zoom to 10x. This is a sensible move, and photos at 10x look fine, if not as crisp as they did on the last model. It’s also pricier this time around, and it was already an expensive phone. It’s pretty darn heavy, too, and Samsung’s switch to titanium for the frame hasn’t made it any lighter.
Personal feelings about the zoom lens aside, the S24 Ultra is still basically peerless. Its much-touted AI features are fine, but if there’s one thing that makes it worth the upgrade, it’s the screen. Its anti-glare coating and boosted maximum brightness make it so comfortable to use outside it’s almost magic. That’s hardly a fancy new tech feature, but the Galaxy S24 Ultra is hardly any old phone.
Screen:6.82-inch 1440p 120Hz LTPO OLED /Processor:Snapdragon 8 Gen 3Cameras:50-megapixel f/1.6 main with OIS, 64-megapixel 3x telephoto with OIS, 48-megapixel f/2.2 ultrawide /Battery:5400mAh /Charging:80W wired, 50W wireless /Weather-resistance rating:IP65
After a few years and a little soul-searching, OnePlus is back to its roots. The OnePlus 12 is an excellent device with high-end performance with a competitive price: $799 for the base model with a hefty 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.
For that price, you get a crisp 1440p 6.8-inch display, a top-tier Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset, and a capable camera. It supports wireless charging, something that previous OnePlus flagships have skipped. Battery performance is fantastic, too — power users can get through a full day, and light users can stretch it to two.
Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge
The OnePlus 12 gets the basics right at a very nice price.
What stands out about the OnePlus 12, though, might just be what’s not here: a bunch of AI features. Honestly? That’s kind of refreshing. Some of the AI features Google and Samsung are busy shipping right now are nice, but none of them feel essential. If you want to sit out this AI hype cycle but you still want a great phone, the OnePlus 12 might be the one.
Does anyone truly need a folding phone? Probably not. But using one is awfully nice, and the Pixel 9 Pro Fold is the nicest book-style foldable I’ve used to date. It’s pricey, it’s still bulkier than a slab-style phone, and its cameras aren’t quite as nice as the other Pixel 9 Pro phones. But it’s a joy to use, both as a regular phone with the cover screen and when you unfold the big inner screen.
The 9 Pro Fold is Google’s second folding phone, following up the passport-shaped Pixel Fold with a format that feels much more familiar. The outer screen measures 6.3 inches on the diagonal, but more importantly, the ratio is the same as Google’s slab phones. By comparison, Samsung’s Z Fold 6 uses a taller, narrower format that feels cramped. Having used them both, I much prefer the 9 Pro Fold’s approach.
Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge
The inner screen is great and all, but how about that outer screen?
That said, the 9 Pro Fold isn’t without compromises. The camera system isn’t quite as good as what you get in the other 9 Pro phones. The outer screen isn’t as sharp or bright as the Pixel 9 Pro’s, either. And it’s not as durable as its slab-style counterparts — there’s no dust resistance, and you can’t get it repaired just anywhere. For $1,800, that’s an awful lot to swallow. For the adventurous early adopter, though, the 9 Pro Fold will be very rewarding.
Screen:6.7-inch 1080p 120Hz OLED /Processor:Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 /Cameras:50-megapixel F/1.9 main with OIS, 50-megapixel ultrawide, 32-megapixel selfie /Battery:4,700mAh /Charging:45W wired, 15W wireless /Weather resistance:IP54
The Nothing Phone 2 doesn’t offer the very best value proposition in its upper-midrange category. But if it’s style you’re after and something a little flashy (well, a lot flashy), then the Phone 2 is an easy pick.
It offers a good 6.7-inch screen, great daily performance and battery life, and a capable camera system. But that’s the usual stuff — what’s unusual about the Phone 2 is its set of LED light strips on the back panel. They illuminate in combinations called “glyphs,” and you can set them to alert you to certain notifications. It’s neat but ultimately isn’t as helpful as the system’s customizable always-on display.
Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge
The Phone 2’s UI is on-theme.
On the downside, the Phone 2 is only splash-resistant rather than fully resistant to water submersion like virtually all other phones over $500. It’s also not fully supported on Verizon’s network, which takes it out of contention for a lot of the US population.
If neither of the above is a deal-breaker, and the Phone 2’s styling appeals to you, then it’s an excellent choice. One thing’s for sure — it definitely stands out from the crowd.
There are many more great Android devices that weren’t covered here, and a few are worth calling out that didn’t quite make the cut for a recommendation.
First off, there’s the Galaxy Z Flip 6, Samsung’s excellent clamshell-style foldable. It’s not as much fun to use as the 2024 Motorola Razr Plus — which facilitates using apps on the cover screen more easily — but Motorola’s track record for software updates isn’t great, so the Z Flip 6 is a safer bet for a flip phone.
The OnePlus Open is also another good book-style foldable option. It’s thin and light, and the software includes some thoughtful approaches to multitasking — a crucial part of the folding phone experience. But it won’t be supported with software updates for as long as the Pixel 9 Pro Fold or the Galaxy Z Fold 6.
Last but not least, there’s the Google Pixel 8A. If you really want to maximize the return on your investment, it’s hard to beat Google’s latest midrange phone. It covers all the basics for $499 while offering seven years of software support.
Update, September 13th:Replaced the Samsung Galaxy S24 Plus with the Google Pixel 9 as the best Android phone for most people; replaced the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 with the Google Pixel 9 Pro as the best folding phone.
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Image: Nintendo
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Screenshots: David Pierce / The Verge
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Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge
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Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge
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Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge
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Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge
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Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge
