No Man’s Sky is finally getting a ship editor in latest update
Image: Hello Games
No Man’s Sky just keeps on expanding. Hello Games is releasing the game’s 27th update today, dubbed “Orbital,” and it adds some major features including improved space stations and a tool for customizing ships.
The studio says that the stations are now much larger and more impressive from the outside and that the insides are now “vast, procedurally generated, and incredibly diverse.” Most notably, they now feature ship editors where players can customize their personal spacecraft.
“We haven’t introduced customisation previously, because so many players love exploring to find the perfect ship already out there to purchase,” Hello explains. “In keeping with exploration, to customise their ship, Travellers gather and trade parts for their ships as they explore, salvaging the best components from wrecks and ruins.”
Image: Hello Games
There’s a bunch of other stuff in the update as well. That includes a revamped guild system that makes “joining guilds and increasing reputation a much larger part of the game,” a refreshed user interface, and the ability to send out your frigate fleets on away missions. You can check out the full update notes right here.
The Disney Plus-Hulu merger is way more than a streaming bundle
It’s Hulu. In Disney Plus. | Image: Disney
As of today, Hulu is part of Disney Plus. Hulu still exists — it still even has its own app — but it’s also being bundled into Disney’s primary streaming service alongside all the company’s other content. Even the Disney Plus logo changed to integrate that iconic green Hulu hue.
From a product perspective, the Hulu integration is roughly what you’d imagine. Hulu is now a tile inside the app, next to Marvel and Pixar and National Geographic and the rest. The price hasn’t changed; it’s still US-only, and the app’s not going away. Hulu shows and movies will also show up in search results and recommendations; if you’re subscribed to Hulu, you’ll get everything seamlessly, and if you’re not, the app will try to convince you to sign up. Disney has been beta-testing this for months, and it works fine — it can be somewhat confusing to figure out what’s “a Hulu thing,” whereas “a Pixar thing” is much easier to define, but there’s nothing shockingly new or confusing here. It’s just Hulu inside of Disney Plus.
Image: Disney
Most — but not all — of the Hulu library is coming to Disney Plus.
But “it’s just Hulu inside of Disney Plus” turns out to be a bigger deal — and a bigger undertaking — than it sounds. As it has prepared to integrate Hulu, Disney has also been changing the way the whole company thinks about streaming. It has worked to better integrate everything from login tools to advertising platforms to metadata and personalization systems so that Disney can go from owning a collection of streaming services and platforms to having something much more like a single product across the whole company.
So, yes, Hulu is just a tile. But that tile also seems to represent something bigger inside of Disney: the full Disney Plus-ification of everything, as the tech and strategy it built over the last few years percolates out to everything else Disney does. “We zoomed out and took a very long-term approach,” says Aaron LaBerge, the president and CTO of Disney Entertainment and ESPN. “We’re going to be running a streaming service forever.”
Here’s just one example of what that looks like: Chris Lawson, the EVP of content operations at the company, estimates that Disney had to move more than 100,000 individual assets from Hulu to Disney Plus in order to make this work. “It’s a mixture of content that we own and content from our partners,” he says. Every partner shares that content in different ways, in different formats, with different metadata attached.
Hulu, a 16-year-old app, runs on a very different technological platform than the four-year-old Disney Plus. So Disney had to re-encode all the Hulu video files to work on Disney Plus, which it could have done in a relatively straightforward way, but instead, the company decided to use this opportunity to roll out a single content library system for everything, everywhere. That’s still in progress, LaBerge says: “that in and of itself has been a bit of a massive lift. But when it’s all said and done, we will have one master media library for the entire company that has the same consistent metadata formats, description of content, and playback encoding, that is the highest quality it can be for the entire Walt Disney Company.”
A lot of those 100,000 assets, by the way, aren’t video files. They’re artwork designed to be used in various places in the app, in email marketing blasts, on Hollywood billboards, and elsewhere. Disney Plus, a huge global service, requires content providers to include lots of this stuff alongside every title, up to twice as much as Hulu requires. So part of the process for Disney has been to adapt all that Hulu art and to bring everybody else up to Disney Plus standards going forward. “When the next Marvel movie comes out, there’s a specification for how the content needs to be delivered and what artwork is associated with it,” LaBerge says.
Image: Disney
The Hulu on Disney Plus logo isn’t exactly breaking new ground.
The same goes for the metadata, the information about each title. Streaming metadata is a mess; every studio, producer, and platform seems to have a different language with which to talk about content. Disney has been building something like a universal metadata translator, says Jay Donnell, the company’s SVP of product engineering. “We don’t assume one source of truth,” he says. “We can ingest content from all these different catalogs and have it represented in a unified way.”
That improved metadata makes things like search better — and also improves personalization. By unifying everything in the background, Disney now plans to use all the company’s data about you to recommend stuff you might like. What you watch on Hulu will affect your Disney Plus recommendations and vice versa; so will the rides you go on at Disney World or the teams you care about on ESPN. Disney has been working to unify identities so that who you are on the Hulu app is connected to who you are on Disney Plus and ESPN and your cable box. (That also helps with cracking down on password sharing.) Much of this is only starting to roll out now, but LaBerge says it’ll get better fast as it flows through Disney’s machine learning systems. Even search can be personalized in real time, Lawson says, based on what you’re watching and thus likely to be looking for.
Over time, the goal is to make all of Disney’s streaming services, and maybe even all of Disney, work out of this single system. That means making the tools work in many languages, across many regions, and with many partners. It’ll take a while, and ultimately, it will affect much more than just Disney Plus, too. It’ll change the way the entire company thinks about, creates, and distributes content. LaBerge says a few times that the Hulu integration launch is just the first instantiation of a lot of new systems and products that will eventually show up everywhere else — including even places like the Hulu app, where users might start to notice better recommendations and streaming quality.
When I ask LaBerge if this feels like an inflection point, the moment Disney Plus really took over Disney, he says yes. But not in the way I’m thinking. The future isn’t necessarily one behemoth app for everything, he says. “It could all be one app, and it could also exist outside of one app — the way we’re designing it, it won’t matter.” You and I, the viewers, might never notice the changes Disney’s making, except that, hopefully, everything gets a little better. But all around Disney, the tech the company built to launch its flagship streaming service is starting to reshape how everything works under the surface. In that sense, the Disney Plus takeover is even bigger than it looks.
Israel Deploys Expansive Facial Recognition Program in Gaza The experimental effort, which has not been disclosed, is being used to conduct mass surveillance of Palestinians in Gaza, according to military officials and others.
Nissan announces plans to make 16 new electrified vehicles by 2026
Image: Nissan
Nissan has laid out a new plan to electrify 16 of the 30 vehicles it produces by 2026, with the rest using internal combustion instead. For those of us in North America, the company says it plans to release seven new vehicles in the US and Canada, although it’s not clear how many of those will be some type of EV.
Nissan says the US is getting “e-POWER and plug-in hybrid models” — each of those uses a mix of electricity and fuel for power. At the moment, the only all-electric EVs Nissan is producing are the Ariya SUV and the perhaps endangered (or maybe not) Leaf.
In 2021, Nissan said it would make 23 electrified vehicles by 2030, and that 15 of those would be fully electric, rather than some form of hybrid vehicle. It’s hard to say if any of this is a step forward from that plan, because yes, 16 is bigger than 15, but Nissan doesn’t explicitly say how many of those 16 are all-battery, or indeed if any of them are. We’ve asked Nissan, but it did not immediately respond.
The company did, however, say it’s expecting 60 percent of its vehicles to be “electrified” by 2030, up from its 50 percent promise by that same deadline. It also upped the total number of electrified vehicles to 34 by the same year.
The company seems to be walking back its “all-solid-state” battery plans for 2028. Now, it says it will produce vehicles with “enhanced NCM li-ion, LFP and all-solid-state batteries,” by that deadline. You can read the full announcement here, where Nissan also goes over its future investment strategies, plans for regions like Europe and Japan, and manufacturing expansion.
DeSantis Signs Social Media Bill Barring Accounts for Children Under 14 A new Florida law also requires apps like TikTok and Snapchat to obtain a parent’s consent before giving accounts to 14- and 15-year-olds.
Telegram’s Peer-to-Peer Login system is a risky way to save $5 a month
Please don’t sign up for this program. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Telegram is offering a new way to earn a premium subscription free of charge: all you have to do is volunteer your phone number to relay one-time passwords (OTP) to other users. This, in fact, sounds like an awful idea — particularly for a messaging service based around privacy.
X user @AssembleDebugspotted details about the new program on the English-language version of a popular Russian-language Telegram information channel. Sure enough, there’s a section in Telegram’s terms of service outlining the new “Peer-to-Peer Login” or P2PL program, which is currently only offered on Android and in certain (unspecified) locations. By opting in to the program, you agree to let Telegram use your phone number to send up to 150 texts with OTPs to other users logging in to their accounts. Every month your number is used to send a minimum number of OTPs, you’ll get a gift code for a one-month premium subscription.
Boy does this sound like a bad idea, starting with the main issue: your phone number is seen by the recipient every time it’s used to send an OTP. And if anything unpleasant happens as a result of this, Telegram’s terms make it clear it’s on you:
Accordingly, you understand and agree that Telegram will not be liable for any inconvenience, harassment or harm resulting from unwanted, unauthorized or illegal actions undertaken by users who became aware of your phone number through P2PL.
Once an OTP has been sent from your number, the recipient might just text you back. People participating in the P2PL program are told not to text the recipients of OTPs, even if they texted first — but there’s no way for Telegram to enforce that, no way to restrict people from replying to the OTP text. This seems like a particularly bad place to employ the honor system.
Telegram says it’s offering this program to make receiving access codes via SMS more reliable in certain areas. A more cynical read might be that the company is trying to avoid fees imposed for sending codes via SMS — a move from the X / Twitter playbook. In fact, Telegram is taking zero responsibility if your carrier charges you a fee for sending access codes.
It’s all pretty uncharacteristic for a company that touts a “revolutionary privacy policy.” Telegram’s global user base has been attracted to the platform as an algorithm-free means of distributing information, both for good and not-so-good. We’ve reached out to Telegram for a comment on this new program and will update this post if we hear back.
Altogether, it seems like an awful lot to risk just to save $5 a month. Our free advice? Steer clear of this offer if you see it.
Microsoft is making Chrome’s text rendering better on Windows
Illustration: The Verge
Microsoft has committed changes to Chromium that will improve text rendering on Windows machines. Following years of complaints, Chrome version 124 will finally support contrast and gamma values from the Windows ClearType Text Tuner for text rendering in Google’s browser.
This change should mean Chrome will finally match the improvements Microsoft made to Edge for font and text rendering, so you can apply text contrast enhancements and gamma correction to improve the readability of text on webpages. Chrome uses Skia for text rendering with hard-coded values for contrast and gamma, so it wasn’t picking up the improvements that ClearType has to offer.
Microsoft’s ClearType font technology has long been used in Windows to improve text rendering on screens, with the aim of making text look like it was printed on a piece of paper. Now, Neowin has spotted that Microsoft engineers have integrated ClearType Text Tuner support into Chrome so it picks up any changes to contrast and gamma, just like most other native Windows apps.
Kurt Catti-Schmidt, a senior software development engineer at Microsoft, has led the push here. Catti-Schmidt has been on a mission to improve text rendering on Chromium-based browsers in recent months and regularly focuses on accessibility improvements to both Edge and Chrome.
These latest changes are part of Microsoft’s commitment to improving Chromium-based browsers on Windows after the company made the move to Chromium in its own Edge browser more than five years ago. At the time, Microsoft said it would “offer our Windows platform expertise to improve the experience of all Chromium-based browsers on Windows,” and that promise has held true. Microsoft has helped improve scrolling in Chrome, touch support, and much more.
Joe Biden wants to make mac and cheese with clean energy
The production line of Easy Mac Macaroni & Cheese Cups on March 27, 2020, at the Kraft Heinz plant in Champaign, Ill. | Zbigniew Bzdak/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
The Biden administration today announced the largest investment in cleaning up industrial greenhouse gas emissions to date. The Department of Energy (DOE) selected 33 projects across more than 20 states to receive up to $6 billion in federal funding for clean energy technologies. It’s a diverse cohort spanning from mac-and-cheese maker Kraft Heinz to manufacturers of chemicals, paper, and construction materials.
Industrial emissions account for almost a quarter of the nation’s planet-heating pollution. It’s also widely considered the most difficult kind of climate pollution to prevent. Alternatives to fossil fuel-fired furnaces and industrial processes have lagged behind other clean energy technologies. The Biden administration thinks it can change that by funding these projects, with the hope that they’ll become sustainable models for broader swaths of industry.
“The solutions that we are funding are replicable, and they’re scalable, meaning they’re going to set a new gold standard for clean manufacturing in the United States and around the world,” Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said in a Friday press call.
Kraft Heinz is eligible for up to $170.9 million in funding under the program. It’ll use the cash to update and electrify 10 facilities in nine states, including its plant in Holland, Michigan, where it produces those iconic blue packages of mac and cheese.
“It takes a whole lot of heat to dry all that macaroni which produces a whole lot of emissions. And so this project is going to deploy clean tech like heat pumps and electric heaters and electric boilers to slash those emissions 99 percent,” Granholm said in the call with reporters.
Ice cream manufacturing in Vermont, Missouri, and Tennessee will also get an upgrade with up to $20.9 million in funding. Unilever will use the money to replace gas boilers with electric boilers and heat pumps. The goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from producing Ben & Jerry’s, Breyers, Klondike, Magnum, Popsicle, Talenti, and other packaged ice cream products.
Bulleit Whiskey maker Diageo Americas Supply will also replace gas-fired heat with cleaner alternatives thanks to up to $75 million in funding. It plans to use electric boilers and new-fangled heat batteries powered by renewable energy generated on-site at its facilities in Kentucky and Illinois. Diageo is partnering with startup Rondo Energy, which developed the heat battery with funding from Bill Gates’ climate investment fund, Breakthrough Energy Ventures.
Another 12 projects aim to slash carbon dioxide emissions from iron, steel, cement, and concrete production. Five aluminum and copper projects were also selected for funding. These are all materials vital to building out the infrastructure needed to decarbonize the US economy.
Electrifying buildings and machinery can prevent pollution from oil, coal, and gas — but only if the power grid is revamped to run on clean energy. That means laying down many more power lines made up of aluminum and copper and reinforced with steel. Concrete, meanwhile, is the most widely used substance in the world after water and, on its own, generates 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
The DOE thinks the projects it selected can collectively prevent the equivalent of more than 14 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually. That would be like taking 3 million gas-powered cars off the road each year. The initiatives are also expected to reduce other kinds of pollution that come from burning fossil fuels, like soot and smog-forming nitrogen oxides. Close to eighty percent of the projects are located in disadvantaged communities, according to the Biden administration. And awardees are required to craft a community benefits plan aimed at including residents and labor groups in the planning process.
Funding for these projects includes $489 million from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and another $5.47 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act. The projects selected so far will still have to go through a negotiation process with the DOE before receiving funds. Senior administration officials say the projects were selected based on assessments of their ability to reduce emissions, market viability, speed to deployment, and potential community benefits ranging from new jobs to a cleaner environment.
Where to preorder Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree (and what’s included)
The world of Elden Ring expands on June 21st with a new world, items, and bosses to slay. | Image: Amazon
We spent much of the time following Elden Ring’s launch begging FromSoftware to expand the universe of its latest Game of the Year award-worthy soulslike. By now, you’ll realize our prayers were answered. Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree will launch on June 21st for the PlayStation 5, Xbox, and PC. It takes place in a whole new area separate from the game’s standard map, one filled with new stories, characters, and bosses to slay. It sounds full enough to be a standalone game, but alas, you’ll need the base game to enjoy the $39.99 expansion.
When it comes to purchasing options, Shadow of theErdtree is not your average piece of downloadable content — there are preorder bonuses, physical bundles, and special editions with collector’s items to complete the experience. It can be confusing to figure out what you get with each version, so below, we’ve detailed all of the various Shadow of the Erdtree preorder options and what you’ll acquire with each.
Preordering the standard edition of Shadow of the Erdtree
You can currently preorder the standard edition of Shadow of the Erdtree digitally for the PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X / S, and PC via Steam for $39.99. All preorders come with a bonus gesture that you can use in-game.
As of writing, the PlayStation Store doesn’t currently list the base PS4 version of Shadow of the Erdtree; however, some of the bundles in the PlayStation Store do show PS4 availability alongside PS5, and we’ve called those out below, where available. We’ve also contacted Bandai Namco to clarify some confusion surrounding Erdtree’s PS4 release.
Preordering the premium edition of Shadow of the Erdtree
For $49.99, you can preorder the Shadow of the Erdtree Premium Bundle, which includes a digital art book and soundtrack, in addition to the standard bonus gesture. The premium version is available for the PS5, Xbox, and Steam on PC.
Preordering Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree Edition
As expected, you’ll need the base game to play Shadow of the Erdtree. If you don’t already have it, you can purchase Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree Edition, which bundles the original game, the digital soundtrack, and a digital art book for one $79.99 purchase.
The deluxe edition of Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree is another bundle that adds the base game and DLC to your library with a single $99.99 purchase, but it also nets you the digital art books and soundtracks for both. It’s available digitally for PlayStation and Xbox.
Preordering Shadow of the Erdtree Collector’s Edition
Alright, this is the big one for Elden Ring’s most passionate players. The $249.99 Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree Collector’s Edition doesn’t include the base game — a bummer, given the price — but you do get a code to redeem the DLC and its digital soundtrack, along with a couple of physical items to enjoy.
The physical goods include a 40-page hardcover art book and an 18-inch figurine of Messmer the Impaler, aka a red-caped boss from the DLC who wields a menacing staff and commands a horde of serpents. You can currently preorder it for the PS5, Xbox, or PC exclusively from Bandai Namco’s online storefront.
Preordering Messmer the Impaler’s collectible helmet
If the Messmer figurine that comes with the collector’s edition isn’t enough, you can add a display replica of his helmet, which Bandai Namco is selling for $189.99. The helmet doesn’t come with anything except the helmet and a stand for showcasing it, so you’ll still need to purchase one of the bundles above if you want Shadow of the Erdtree.
The helmet’s design features what appear to be dragon wings and is topped by a pair of fanged, ruby-eyed serpents. It’ll ship starting June 28th, and each one comes with a numbered certificate of authenticity. Official shots of the helmet from Bandai Namco suggest there will be fewer than 10,000 available.
The Sonos Roam 2 may launch in June
The first-generation Roam speakers. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge
Sonos will launch the follow-up to its Roam wireless AirPlay 2 and Bluetooth speaker in June, along with a new app specifically for its portable speakers. That’s according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who writes in his Power On newsletter today that the company has rejiggered the hardware to fix Bluetooth issues with thespeaker.
Gurman writes that the new app will also support the company’s rumored $449 high-end headphones, which may also come in June. However, users will have to wait for the Move 1 and 2 and the first-generation Roam to gain support, as the company has reportedly had trouble getting the software up to snuff.
The original Roam is a solid speaker with some quirks, like no stereo pairing over Bluetooth, which The Verge’s Chris Welch called out in his original review. As he wrote while covering Sonos’ roadmap back in November, some owners have also complained about its battery’s long-term durability. The new Roam is expected to have similar topside touch controls to the Era 100 and 300 speakers. Besides that, the company’s plans reportedly also include a TV set-top box and updated versions of the Sub, Era 100, and Sonos Arc soundbar as it works to shore up its hardware revenue.
The biggest new battle royale is ready for your phone
Image by Cath Virginia / The Verge
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 31, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, hi, sorry for my bad taste in TV, and also, you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I’ve been reading about LA crime rings and AI music tools, watching March Madness even though all my brackets are already busted, watching the story of Mickey Mouse and pretending I don’t care about Love Is Blind while my wife watches even though I’m now kind of obsessed with Love Is Blind, and trying to understand all the basketball terms LeBron James uses in his new podcast.
I also have for you a huge new Netflix show, a super-cheap USB charger, a newish messaging app, the new X-Men series everyone’s excited about, and much more. Oh, and I have some news: if you’re in Chicago or looking for a reason to be in Chicago the weekend of April 13th, I’m going to be there with a few of my friends from The Verge doing an afternoon of AI-related stuff at the Chicago Humanities Festival. It’s going to be fun; get tickets and come hang out!
Alright, jam-packed week. Let’s go.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you into right now? What are you reading, playing, watching, or making that everyone else should be, too? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, forward it to them, and tell them to subscribe here.)
The Drop
3 Body Problem. From the co-creators of Game of Thrones, this is a sprawling sci-fi thriller about spies, theoretical physics, geopolitics, and much more. (I just realized that actually makes it sound a lot like Game of Thrones.) The reviews so far are good, not great, but I’m psyched about this one.
Threads in the fediverse. I want so badly to make “the Threadiverse” a thing. So badly. But I digress: this is cool news! Threads is starting a real beta rollout allowing people to post on Threads and syndicate it through the fediverse via ActivityPub! This is the social networking stuff I believe in.
“Dune: Part Two Director Denis Villeneuve Breaks Down the Sandworm Scene.” I’m sure I’ve said this before, but “watching people do their jobs really, really well” is my favorite genre of YouTube. And if you’ve seen the new Dune flick, you’ll be as blown away as I was by just how thoughtful, and how difficult, this scene was.
Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile. This game took up most of the storage on my phone and makes it heat up to about the surface of the sun every time I play. But this is a proper high-end battle royale game on mobile, and I’ll be playing it (with a controller, like a sane person) a lot this weekend.
The Ikea Sjöss charger. Ikea’s gadgets are like Ikea’s other stuff: not fancy, not super exciting, but cheap and reliable and totally good enough. This new USB wall wart might not charge your laptop super fast, but a $15 two-port USB-C charger is a darn good deal.
Beeper for Android. After the whole iMessage saga, Beeper is back to building excellent cross-platform messaging apps. Its latest Android app is in public beta now, and it’s great. Fast, simple, lots of handy organization features. Who needs iMessage, really?
Stardew Valley1.6. I confess, I never really got into Stardew Valley, but that’s clearly a me problem: the game is at record player levels right now after dropping a huge update with a new farm, a bunch of new stuff you can do, and… mayonnaise. And the game’s on sale right now, too!
Power User. Taylor Lorenz, a great reporter (and friend of Installer) just launched her new podcast this week, and the first episode is a really fun whip around the internet — from TikTok bans to Facebook pokes to Shrimp Jesus, which I just learned is a real and horrifying thing. (I suppose I should disclose that Taylor’s working with the Vox Media Podcast Network on this one. So there’s that!)
“What is AI Pin?” I find the AI Pin, and frankly, Humane’s whole thing, really interesting. The company has been sort of weird and mysterious for the last year, but this video — which seems to suggest the Pin is shipping really soon — is the most compelling demo and explanation I’ve seen yet.
X-Men ‘97. The X-Men are so back. It has a new animation style, an updated version of the intro and theme song you might remember from the ’90s, and a vibe that will feel good and right to anyone who missed this show during its long absence. I forgot how much I loved it until I was right back in it.
Spotlight
Want to know the single most productive thing I’ve done in the last few weeks? I went and found every single rewards card and gift card in my house, basically everything I have with a barcode on it, and scanned them all into an app just by taking pictures of each one. Now, I have all those cards with me at all times, which means that the next time I stumble on a Chipotle, a Cold Stone Creamery, a Starbucks, or the concert venue a few blocks away from my house, I’ll actually be able to use these cards.
Seriously, I cannot recommend this enough. Gift cards are a nice thing but a terrible user experience — one study last year found that Americans leave billions of dollars unspent every year. In my case, that’s mostly because I just… never have them with me. (My wife, on the other hand, carries them all everywhere, in an enormous wallet, and can thus never find the ones she needs.) You should do it! Some tips:
There are a bunch of apps that can do this, but on iOS, I did it with the app Barcodes, and on Android, I used Stocard. Stocard’s “offers” are kind of incessant and annoying because the app is trying to be a rewards program in its own right, but in general, I like both apps.
You can do some of this in Google Wallet or Apple Wallet, but those interfaces are weirder and less reliable, in my experience. If you don’t want to use an app at all, you can probably just use a folder of photos, but the apps make it all better.
You might be amazed how many things you can put in here. Anything with a code you scan — a gym pass, a Costco card, the thing you use to get into a parking garage, any QR code — can go in there. All the swipe-y magnetic strip stuff, though, no dice.
Barcodes has some really great widgets, and I’d set one of them up with your most-used card. So, like, Starbucks + grocery store + parking garage, all super easy to access. (It’s also really handy on the Apple Watch.)
I’ve seen some stories about scanners, especially old ones or ones at an angle, that can’t quite scan a code on your phone. I haven’t had any issues yet, but maybe don’t throw away your most important cards just in case.
It’s very possible I’m the last person on the planet to learn about these apps and get this done. But I’ve already had it come in handy a bunch of times, and I’m actually using all my various cards instead of just leaving them in my desk drawer and occasionally wishing I had them on me.
My only real product request would be to be able to use my phone’s NFC chip for key fobs and other tappable cards — and hey, there’s a whole antitrust case about that now. It could happen.
Screen share
A real phrase I heard someone use to describe Chris Grant the other day is “heat pump influencer.” It’s a pretty good descriptor, actually. Chris is one of the handiest people I know, the proud owner of a truly remarkable retro gaming rig, and the group publisher for both Polygon and The Verge. But I think, in his heart of hearts, he might just want to talk heat pumps all day.
I asked Chris to share his homescreen, curious which of his many interests would shine through. Are there… heat pump social networks? How many legal-ish emulators would he have? Chris contains multitudes, but he only has the one homescreen. Here it is, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:
The phone: I use a Pixel 7A for a bunch of reasons, but chief among them is… it’s affordable. I really think smartphones are commodities. The 7A does everything I need it to do, it has an excellent camera, and if I accidentally toss it into the ocean, it’s not a catastrophic financial loss.
The wallpaper: My wallpaper is a picture of my boys and my niece and nephew crammed into my bakfiets (a Dutch front-loaded cargo bike). We use the bike for school drop-off every morning and for any neighborhood kid transport. I added a Bafang motor to it last year, which has extended its utility even further, but it was still leg-powered when I took this pic.
The apps: Weather, Photos, Home Assistant, Sonos, Puzzmo. Notion, Joplin, Slack, Keep Notes, Calculator, Discord, Phone, Messages, Gmail, Chrome, Camera.
My actual homescreen is blank, with the exception of the fixed row of apps and the Google search bar built into the bottom of the Pixel launcher. I really enjoy the simplicity of keeping my Google Discover feed one window to the left, my pinned apps one window to the right, and the entire app library one swipe up. But that’s boring, so I’ll share my pinned apps window, which is… kind of a mess.
I want to start with Google Photos, which is easily one of my top-used apps every day and was a major reason I got an Android phone. There is nothing more important than the pictures on my phone, and I’ve stored them in Google Photos for a long time.
Home Assistant is another frequently accessed app. I use the Android “Device controls” drawer for a lot of things, but I also like to just mess around. If you think my homescreen is a mess, my Home Assistant dashboard is actually criminal. No, you can’t see it.
I have Sonos here, in part to visually remind me, “Hey, remember music? You can play it sometimes.” I still forget. Slack is… well, you know what it is. Opposite Slack is Discord, which, in my brain, is quite specifically not-Slack, so this makes sense. Puzzmo! I really like the crossword, and Typeshift and Flip Art, and and and. You should play Puzzmo with me!
My only folder: Synology. This is for my NAS. While I, like you, probably, trust way too much of my life with cloud services run by companies that I don’t really believe have my best interests in mind, I’m trying to be more thoughtful. My pandemic treat was a NAS, which I use to host all sorts of things. I’m cautious about what’s exposed to the web, versus just my local network, and I still often default to cloud services (see: Google Photos, above) but all in all, I aspire to be a personal cloud kind of person.
I use the Calculator and Weather apps a lot, so what?
The note apps. I (like David) am constantly looking for the best tools to organize my brain. After being an Evernote user for over 15 years (!), I finally decided it was time to move things off as prices increased and their focus on just being a reliable place to store notes and documents wavered. I settled on Joplin, a serviceable alternative with some notable limitations, most notably, its markdown-heavy UX and its mobile app, which struggles to surface everything I have in the Joplin Cloud account. Maybe this goes self-hosted?
Notion, I enjoy using, but I don’t know that I will ever trust it with the sheer volume of data I had in Evernote (and now Joplin). And lastly, Keep is… an app. It stores our family shopping list, which is all it has to do, I suppose.
I also asked Chris to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he shared:
MiSTerCade. I recently got a Sega New Astro City arcade cabinet, which is the kind of really indulgent purchase I’ve put off forever, and somewhere in that pandemic haze, I decided it was time to just do it. I also got a MiSTerCade to actually play games on (you can read my primer on MiSTer here), and wouldn’t you know it, I’ve had a hard time dismantling the thing because it’s just so much fun to play.
Heat pump hot water heaters. I am just really excited about heat pumps and the electrification of our heating infrastructure in general. I’ve helped close to a dozen friends and neighbors replace their dead or dying gas or standard electric units, three of whom were this year already. If you’re reading this, consider the 30 percent IRA tax credit, whatever local utility rebates you might be eligible for, and the annual cost savings inherent in a technology that literally generates more energy out than you put in, a magical principle known as the coefficient of performance. Add in some renewable energy sources — say, rooftop solar? — and you’re taking a meaningful bite out of your annual energy consumption. (Editor’s note: I TOLD YOU.)
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. The storied Prince of Persia franchise morphing into a Metroidvania platformer shouldn’t feel this seamless and obvious, but somehow, it does. I’ve found myself poring over the game’s massive world as I slowly chip away at its map, chase its challenges, and scour its secrets.
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 +1 203-570-8663 with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here every week.
“This video on the engineering details behind Apple’s new $130 USB-C cable.” – Vinay
“You mentioned that Proton is the best non-Gmail alternative, and although I do agree that it’s not bad, many sites don’t like Proton, and a lot of people in the privacy community have voiced issues with it. I personally have Fastmail, and I love it. It’s about $60 / year for my plan, and it comes with up to 600 aliases, so I have one for all major businesses that I interact with (banks, trash company, and so on), then some ones for specific types of businesses.” – Anthony
“Queue is great for tracking shows and movies you want to / are watching and to find new things. I use it all the time.” – Mike
“Checking in a few weeks after iOS 17.4… Transcripts on Apple Podcasts is shockingly good. I’ve fully converted over from Pocket Casts. Ability to quickly scroll through and read an article when I have a few minutes is amazing. There are a couple quirky things that the stock Podcasts app does that I don’t like (no badges for unplayed episodes, downloads don’t delete right away after played, etc.), but I’ve made my peace.” – Omesh
“I just left Evernote after more than a decade of use. Stagnant, bloated, and increasingly overpriced since new ownership. Switched to UpNote and very happy with it so far.” – Kirk
“Stray Shot, a twin-stick arena shooter where your missed shots spawn into more enemies. There’s a timer, and with too few enemies, your score will be low, but too many will probably overwhelm you. There are eight arenas with multiple enemy types and a few different game modes. Single or multiplayer.” – 301
“Got back into playing Risk on iOS. I basically just play very quick games against the computer every now and then, and it’s fun. I just ignore all the in-app purchase stuff they’ve added to it since the last time I opened it.” – Julián
“Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer. I highly recommend the book, as it was just an incredible account of the Lincoln assassination, from the plot to the shooting and the escape. Of course, I will check out the miniseries as well.” – John
Signing off
The up arrow on my keyboard is stuck. I could probably figure out how to fix it, but I’m choosing instead to take this as an excuse to buy a new keyboard. (Plus, the last time I tried to fix my keyboard, I broke it even worse and bought a new one anyway — I figure, this time, I’m just cutting out the middleman.)
I’ve never been a mechanical keyboard fan — too loud! — but I’m realizing that if you’re not into mechanical keyboards, all your choices are kind of boring. I’m worried I’ll just end up getting lazy and buy Apple’s Magic Keyboard. (In black, natch.) Maybe it’s time to get a mechanical keyboard and just be obnoxiously loud all the time? It’s probably time. Wish me and my wallet luck.
AI-generated blues misses a human touch — and a metronome
Suno will happily sing you a tune. | Image: The Verge / Shutterstock
I heard a new song last weekend called “Soul Of The Machine.” It’s a simple, old-timey number in E minor with a standard blues chord progression (musicians in the know would call it a 1-4-5 progression). In it, a voice sings about being a trapped soul with a heart that once beat but is now cold and weak.
“Soul Of The Machine” is not a real song at all. Or is it? It’s getting harder to say. Whatever it is, it’s the creation of Suno, an AI tool from a startup of the same name focused on music generation. Rolling Stone said this song’s prompt was “solo acoustic Mississippi Delta blues about a sad AI.” And you know what? I doubt I’d glance askance at it if I heard it in a mix of human-recorded Delta blues tunes. The track is technically impressive, fairly convincing, and not all that good.
I spent 10 years or so as a semiprofessional or professional musician, onstage at least four nights a week. For some of that time, I played in a genre called Western Swing. Bob Wills is the most famous example of the style, but some very smart people have argued that more of his credit should go to Milton Brown, who drew more directly from early blues and swing acts like The Hokum Boys (which featured Big Bill Broonzy) or Bessie Smith. I preferred to play more like Milton Brown.
I’ve played the basic chord progression from “Soul Of The Machine” — and variations of it —countless times. So, when I say that the chords meander in nonsensical ways, it’s because I’ve also wandered in this style. Playing with the rhythm and structure is supposed to build tension and release it, and this song doesn’t do that. For contrast, notice the difference in the way Mississippi John Hurt smartly plays with the rhythm in “It Ain’t Nobody’s Business,” using tricks like dragging out pauses or singing sections on a different beat than you’d expect.
But when I tried to play my guitar along with “Soul Of The Machine,” I couldn’t stay on tempo. The song just steadily winds down, like a steam engine creeping to a stop. Bad tempo or weird chord changes aren’t wrong or bad on their own — nothing is definitively wrong or bad in music — but people who struggle with rhythm don’t just slow down like that. Instead, their tempo rises and falls. And when they make weird chord choices, it’s because they like how it sounds. AI doesn’t have such motivations.
Suno’s model might eventually make music that doesn’t have the quirky artifacts — like the dragging tempo or weird chord changes — that draw attention to its algorithmic core. But not making mistakes is only part of what it needs to do to compete with human music.
As a musician, performing for a live audience was necessary for making money and becoming a known quantity. But we also needed to be good. Doing it well means reacting during a show, lingering on part of a song when the crowd loves it, or switching the setlist up on the fly. When we were at our best, we formed something like a symbiosis with our audience for a few fleeting moments or sometimes for a whole set. The best performers can make that happen almost at will. (I was not one of those performers.)
It’s hard to imagine Suno or anything like it ever being able to pull that off. So I don’t expect it to be a straight-up replacement for live music, which is one of the most important parts of the medium, anytime soon. But that’s only one part of the package, right? Before we get to a robotic band drawing people to a dance floor or making folks cry in an auditorium, AI needs to transcend the parlor trick of imitation and start demonstrating an understanding of what moves people.
Suno co-founder Mikey Shulman told Rolling Stone that the relationship with listeners and music makers is currently “so lopsided” but that Suno can fix that. He said Suno’s goal isn’t to replace musicians but “to get a billion people much more engaged with music than they are now.” The company’s founders “imagine a world of wildly democratized music making.” That’s an idea that people often float for AI art as well. It sounds like a friendly, lofty goal, and I get the appeal — it’s not all that different from what made Neo learning Kung Fu through a neck plug in The Matrix such an attractive idea. No, Suno won’t instantly teach someone how to make music, but if you want to make a blues song and you’ve never picked up a guitar, “Soul Of The Machine” could make that feel almost within reach.
But I always get stuck on that word: democratized. Rolling Stone was paraphrasing Suno in that instance, but plenty of AI art proponents have used the word “democratizing” while extolling the benefits of creating text or art through an algorithmic proxy, and it carries this unsettling implication that, somehow, creative people are gatekeeping the creative process.
Even if that were true, it’s not very clear that Suno could help with that. It’s questionable whether tools like it are anywhere close to making the leap, on their own, from digital facsimile to human-style creativity.
Image created with ChatGPT by Wes Davis / The Verge
AI image generators have the same problems with details, like the image above, where I tried to get ChatGPT to give me something like Mike Mignola’s Hellboy. As a teenager, I would pull Mignola’s comic pages as close as my eyes would let me so I could soak up the details. Here, the details make it worse, not better. My enjoyment crumbles when I see quirks like a missing foot or a jacket morphing into the fake Hellboy’s arms.
I’m sympathetic to the desire to use AI to make up for any shortcomings I have as an artist, but every time I hear talk about democratizing creativity, I can’t help but picture someone arguing with one of these gatekeepers when they could just walk around them by simply doing creative things.
That’s not to say you won’t find people trying to gatekeep art, but I’ve found there are more artists offering help and encouragement than demanding my bona fides before I can join their ranks. You could sum up many artists’ attitudes with this quote from songwriter Dan Reeder: “You can make a mess of the simplest song, and no one will laugh at you. And if they do, they can blow me, too, ‘cause no one should laugh at you.”
“And then it can take two months to have 15 images produced.”
None of this is to say AI needs to replace creativity outright to be useful. I wouldn’t argue if you told me you thought Dustin Ballard’s “There I Ruined It” AI voice parody songs — which work because of his impressive singing ability and musical understanding — are art. And as The Verge’s Becca Farsace showed in a December video, Boris Eldagsen spends months on AI-generated artwork that shows how his “promptography” can create thought-provoking work.
In both cases, AI isn’t used as a shortcut to creativity. Instead, it enhances the ideas they already had and may even inspire new ones. If anything, they reinforce the idea that if you want to create something, there’s only one way: just be creative.
32°N’s liquid lens sunglasses double as reading glasses for GenXers
Sunglasses that convert to reading glasses with a swipe.
Glasses are the defining feature of the nerd emoji, but add a dark tint to those lenses, and suddenly you and the emoji are cool. Glasses with chips are for “glassholes” and reading glasses are for olds — and nothing, I think we can agree, is lamer than an over-40-year-old like me.
So what happens if you combine reading glasses with sunglasses and put a chip in that so discretely that nobody can even tell?
That’s what Deep Optics has done with its latest 32°N-branded Muir sunglasses that I’ve been testing for the last few weeks. A swipe on the frame sends an electrical signal to the two liquid crystal lenses to change the state of millions of tiny pixels so that close objects come into focus.
As such, these 32 Degrees North specs eliminate the need to carry (and lose) both reading glasses and sunglasses — at least, that’s the promise made in exchange for $849 of your hard-earned money.
I’ve been enamored by liquid lens tech since I first saw it demonstrated at CES in 2017. That was long before I could admit that I needed reading glasses due to the onset of presbyopia, the gradual age-related loss of my eyes’ ability to focus on anything nearby.
32°N’s Muir sunglasses adjust focus with a swipe to see nearby objects. To be clear (ha!), they are not transition sunglasses that change opacity with the brightness of the sun, nor can they correct near or farsightedness. The lenses from Deep Optics change to reading glasses without ever changing opacity, and 32°N’s sunglasses aren’t offered with prescription lenses. I did all my testing while wearing contact lenses.
The new Muir frames look very similar to the company’s existing Wharton frames, originally launched in 2021 / 2022 as a Kickstarter. Both are offered in chunky black or transparent plastic, but the new Muir frame features a slightly wider and curved fit.
I think the Muir frames looked good on the handful of family and friends I asked to model them. But they don’t feel premium in the hand, reminding me a little too much of those cheap 3D glasses theaters hand out. But if you’re interested in buying these transforming sunglasses, then fashion is a secondary consideration to being able to read a menu while seated at a terrace cafe.
A triple tap on the frame at the right temple activates the Bluetooth radio for pairing. Setup in the 32°N phone app is quick, with an excellent video explainer that walks you through each step. The company also offers guided one-on-one video onboarding sessions if you prefer the human touch. Either way, it’s during setup that you discover exactly how limited those liquid crystal lenses are.
For typical reading glasses, the entire lenses are magnifiers, making them good for seeing things nearby and that’s it. That’s why you see people in their mid-40s and over constantly taking them on and off.
But a single swipe from the right temple toward the ear on the new Muir frame doesn’t transition the entire lenses into magnifiers — it only transitions a squared-off section in each lens where the active liquid crystal lens resides. So, a lens within a lens, if you will, like an on-demand bifocal.
GIF: 32°N
This GIF from 32°N shows the liquid crystal lens being activated for up-close reading.
And within that square is a narrow sweet spot that offers magnification, with everything else in the square blurred when active. With your head and eyes adjusted properly, that narrow magnification band allows me to read about five lines of smartphone text at default settings. To see more, I have to move my head.
Everything outside that liquid crystal square is an unaltered “safety zone” with no magnification at all, making it useful to quickly glance around you without having to swipe to disable magnification.
Another swipe from the temple backward, and the reading glasses revert entirely to sunglasses. From the outside, you can also see the lenses changing but only from certain angles, in just the right lighting, and only if you look very, very closely.
In practice, everything works, but it takes a while to feel natural because the liquid crystal lens doesn’t focus immediately. Even then, after several hours of testing, I still find myself adjusting my eyes or head position to hunt for the sweet spot in order to read things. The gestures, on the other hand, became second nature rather quickly.
After swiping for magnification, you see the lens immediately smear before returning to focus in about two to three seconds. It feels slow, but it’s magnitudes faster than having to fish out a pair of reading glasses. Swiping again to revert back to just sunglasses is more seamless and faster.
The reverse swipe from ear to temple toggles the magnification focal distance between any two of three settings: Watch mode (very close), smartphone (close), laptop (not so close). The focal shift is subtle but meaningful, in my experience. I set mine to toggle between laptop and phone, where I spend most of my reading time.
Holding multiple fingers against the temple toggles the lenses into your default reading mode (smartphone for me) and stays there for a preset delay after the hand is removed (two seconds for me). This proved to be a very useful gesture for quickly checking phone notifications, a payment terminal, or anything else you need to quickly read in close proximity.
But $849 is a lot to spend on these, especially when a decent pair of polarized sunglasses fitted with multi-focal prescription lenses can be had for around $500.
There’s absolutely a gee-whiz factor to liquid crystal lens tech, and the undeniable convenience it offers to any aging GenXer who would benefit from only having to carry (and care for) a single pair of glasses. They (we) were the first generation to grow up with personal computers, so it’s only right that they’re the first to get computerized glasses to keep reading them.
Ultimately, if you’re interested in these new Muir adaptive sunglasses, I’d suggest giving them a try before committing — something 32°N makes possible with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Stability AI CEO resigns to ‘pursue decentralized AI’
Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Emad Mostaque is stepping down from his role as CEO of Stability AI, the startup that helped bring Stable Diffusion to life. In a press release late on Friday night, Stability AI says Mostaque is leaving the company “to pursue decentralized AI.” Mostaque will also step down from his position on the board of directors at Stability AI.
The board has appointed two interim co-CEOs to lead Stability AI — COO Shan Shan Wong and CTO Christian Laforte — while it conducts a search for a permanent CEO. “As we search for a permanent CEO, I have full confidence that Shan Shan Wong and Christian Laforte, in their roles as interim co-CEOs, will adeptly steer the company forward in developing and commercializing industry-leading generative AI products,” says Jim O’Shaughnessy, chairman of the board at Stability AI.
That push toward developing commercialized AI products is likely a big part of why Mostaque has stepped down. “Not going to beat centralized AI with more centralized AI,” said Mostaque in a post on X, following his resignation. “It is now time to ensure AI remains open and decentralized,” says Mostaque in a separate statement.
Mostaque’s departure comes just days after Forbes reported that Stability AI was in trouble after other key developers resigned. Three out of the five researchers who originally created the technology behind Stable Diffusion have left the company recently. The leadership changes at Stability AI also come in the same week rival startup Inflection AI experienced what was effectively a Microsoft talent acquisition.
Google DeepMind co-founder and former Inflection AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman joined Microsoft earlier this week as the CEO of a new AI team. Microsoft also hired some key Inflection AI employees, including co-founder Karén Simonyan who is now the chief scientist of Microsoft AI. Most of Inflection’s staff is joining Microsoft AI, leaving the AI startup to pivot to enterprise offerings.
Stability’s flagship AI product, Stable Diffusion, is used by many to offer text-to-image generation AI tools. Stability released its newest model, Stable Cascade, just weeks ago as an option for researchers on GitHub. Stability AI also started offering a paid membership for commercial use of its models in December, to help fund its research.
Stability AI has popularized the stable diffusion method of AI, but has faced lawsuits around the data that Stable Diffusion is allegedly trained on. A lawsuit in the UK from Getty Images is heading to trial later this year, and it could be a big moment for the legislative framework around generative AI products.
The Government’s Struggles With Outsourcing Software Development The bloated cost of the ArriveCAN app and new investigations into possible fraud have highlighted some problems with turning to outside companies.
The A.I. Boom Makes Millions for an Unlikely Industry Player: Anguilla The small Caribbean territory brought in $32 million last year, more than 10 percent of its G.D.P., from companies registering web addresses that end in .ai.
“GitLab received a DMCA takedown notice from a representative of the rightsholder and followed our standard process outlined here,” spokesperson Kristen Butler tells The Verge.
Suyu was a fork of Yuzu, the emulator that Nintendo successfully sued, but this isn’t about Nintendo now having the rights to Yuzu’s code — or maybe even Nintendo at all? Nintendo didn’t necessarily win the rights to Yuzu’s code in its settlement, and GitLab didn’t tell The Verge that Nintendo is behind the takedown.
One of the emails received by a Suyu contributor.
Instead, as you can see in the email above — one of several being shared in Suyu’s Discord and published earlier by Overkill.wtf — whoever sent the takedown request is trying to piggyback on how Yuzu allegedly violated DMCA 1201 by circumventing Nintendo’s technical protection measures. Oh, and maybe also subtly threatening GitLab with unlawful trafficking (also part of DMCA 1201) while they’re at it.
I’m not a lawyer, but a couple of lawyers told me two years ago that a valid DMCA takedown request should technically contain “a description of the copyrighted work that you claim is being infringed,” and that DMCA 1201 is not the same thing as DMCA 512, which covers takedown requests.
Also, Suyu has claimed it does not include the same circumvention measures as Yuzu.
But those lawyers also told me that valid or invalid, it doesn’t necessarily matter all that much, since a platform like GitLab doesn’t have to host anything that it doesn’t want to host. It may not be worth the time and effort to push back on an invalid DMCA takedown request to protect something you might not even care to protect — particularly if the alternative is Nintendo coming at you with an actual lawsuit.
What Suyu’s GitLab page looks like now.
GitLab didn’t immediately answer a question about whether it’s company policy to disable user’s accounts before giving them the opportunity to delete their projects or file a DMCA counter-notice. The company’s online handbook does not say why GitLab might decide to block or ban a user from its platform; only that “we may, in appropriate circumstances, disable access or terminate the account(s) of the reported user(s).”
Suyu appears to have already found a new home. About an hour ago, its leader wrote “I’m most certainly going to host a copy of the code.” By that point, another member had already cloned the repository to git.suyu.dev.
Motorola spoiled a good budget phone with bloatware
We could’ve had it all, Motorola.
There are some phones that just feel nice to pick up, and the 2024 Moto G Power is one of them. It’s sitting on my desk and even though I don’t need to do anything with it right now, I pick it up anyway. That soft-touch back! The flat-yet-slightly-contoured edges! I turn it to look at the headphone jack on the bottom edge, just to remind myself if it’s there. If the battery is even a little low, I set it on my wireless charging stand just for the thrill. All this on a $300 phone! Imagine!
But after spending a little more time with the Moto G Power, I come crashing back down to reality. The LCD panel isn’t as nice and contrast-y as an OLED (that’s forgivable). The camera is underwhelming and suffers from Motorola’s unusual image processing tendencies (less forgivable). But again, this is a $300 phone in a world where $1,000 is the standard going rate for a top-tier flagship. Much can be forgiven!
Except one thing: the bloatware.
Deals, deals, deals!
If you enable the notifications panel in the shopping app you’ll come face to face with this user privacy nightmare.
Scroll through the app drawer and you’ll see a handful of automatically downloaded “folders.” They are not folders; they are apps. I first encountered them on last year’s Moto G Stylus 5G, and I hate them very much.
There are three main offenders — Shopping, Entertainment, and GamesHub — and each of these apps acts as a little hub. Icons for apps that you have legitimately downloaded will appear in the corresponding “folder.” You’ll also find tons of other suggested apps to download — pages and pages of them! Apps as far as the eye can see!
Dismissing the suggested apps section replaces it with a “Discover” section. In the shopping app, it invites you to “Unlock the power of shopping” with links to buy stuff like kitschy Easter decor from TJ Maxx. Mercifully, there’s a toggle to hide this section.
Moto got the hardware right. The software is another story.
These apps are all made by a company called Swish, and you can’t opt out of downloading any of them during the setup process. You can (and should!) opt out of downloading a third-party lock screen from a different service called Glance.
The more I dig into the software on this phone, the more I hate it. The preinstalled weather app is festooned with ads and even more suggested apps, plus pithy insights like “Gotta love air conditioning at these high levels of humidity.” If you tap the option to remove ads, a pop-up asks you to pay $4 for 1Weather Pro.
Ad-free weather forecasts cost $4, apparently.
Honestly, I’m good on personalized recommendations.
What feels particularly ghoulish is that all of these services are absolutely hungry for your data — they want to be able to send you notifications, track your whereabouts, and download apps on your behalf — and it’s hard to tell exactly what company is behind any of it. The “About” section in the weather app says it comes from a service called OneLouder. OneLouder, it turns out, is owned by Pinsight media, which was formerly owned by Sprint and now owned by a company called InMobi. To be clear, this app asks for constant access to your location. At the very least, it should be clear exactly what company you’re giving that permission to!
You can uninstall all of this garbage — I’m actually begging you to, if you happen to purchase this phone. You can download another weather app from a source your trust, or at least one that you can identify. You can make your own damn app folders. But if you’re not technically savvy, you probably won’t realize you can do all of this. That’s a shame, because there’s a good budget phone underneath all of this crap.
Ikea is now selling a pair of its own USB-C chargers that start at just $7.99. The 30W Sjöss charger comes with a single USB-C port, and there’s also a 45W model (also called Sjöss) that has two USB-C ports for $14.99. This dual-port charger can only output 45W of power when using one port at a time, with the output halved at 22W to each device when plugging in two simultaneously.
Ikea’s chargers are compatible with Power Delivery (PD 3.0), Quick Charge (QC4+), and Programmable Power Supply (PPS) specs. Both chargers come with a sheet of colored stickers that lets you “personalize” them — useful in households where kids or flatmates can easily mix them up.
Although you should always check the small print for the charging standards (and voltage / current) your device needs to charge at its fastest, 30W should be enough to fast-charge some Samsung devices and iPhones, and even matches the wattage of the base charger Apple supplies with its M2-powered MacBook Air. 45W should be able to handle some faster-charging devices too — though, again, be sure to check the fine print.
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