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Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 17, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. If you’re new here, welcome, so psyched you found us, and also, you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.
I also have for you a new Mastodon app, a bunch of new AI tools, a whole new Fortnite universe, an espresso maker, and much more. And I have some thoughts about messaging. Let’s dig in.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What apps are you into right now? What have you read or watched or eaten or played or built recently? 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.)
- Google Gemini. Talking to Google CEO Sundar Pichai this week, I got the distinct sense that he sees the new Gemini model as the moment Google starts to win the AI war. Is he right? Who knows! Gemini certainly has its issues. But you can play with it now in Bard and on the Pixel 8 Pro, and it’s coming to Google products everywhere really soon.
- Beeper Mini. What a saga this was! The universal messaging app released a new app for Android that did one thing — let you send blue-bubble iMessages — and did it well. So well, it seems, that Apple quickly figured out a way to shut it down. I don’t think we’ve seen the last of this back-and-forth.
- The Artificial podcast series. I think every reporter I know is currently digging into the history of OpenAI, trying to figure out how this weirdly structured organization came to be the biggest thing in artificial intelligence. This episode of The Journal (the first in a four-part series, I think) is the clearest origin story I’ve heard so far.
- Mammoth 2. I’ve used a lot of Mastodon apps, and this is my new favorite. Mammoth is nice-looking and fast but also really devoted to helping you find good people and posts on the platform. It’s only for Apple devices, which is a bummer, but it’s a really nice app.
- Resident Evil 4’s VR Mode. You could argue that Resident Evil games have been the best thing in VR for a long time. Now, PSVR users are getting a pretty full VR version of Resident Evil 4, which is one of the best games in the series and was remade as one of the best games of the year. I might need to buy a PSVR for this.
- Lego Fortnite. I played a lot of OG Fortnite recently and actually loved the game minus all the tie-ins and branded stuff. But this is something else: a massive new island and almost an entirely new game within Fortnite. I’ve only played it a bit, but it’s very cool.
- Digital Foundry’s Grand Theft Auto VI trailer breakdown. Have you watched the GTA VI trailer yet? Statistically speaking, I think everyone on earth already has. And if you’re as excited about it as I am, you’ll love this 37-minute, absurdly deep exegesis of practically every frame and pixel we’ve seen so far.
- Disney Plus with Hulu. Disney’s combined streaming service is now in beta testing, which means you might start to see a Hulu tab inside of your Disney app. Fast Company has a fun story on all the unexpected challenges of shoving two services together like this, but ultimately, it looks pretty simple. Hulu is a channel; Disney Plus is the cable bundle. That’s where we’re headed.
- Visual Electric. A new and clever riff on AI image generation — this one gives you all kinds of dynamic control, so instead of prompting and re-prompting, you can tweak your images almost as if you’re in Photoshop. It also has auto-complete suggestions as you type, which has led me down some deeply weird rabbit holes.
I’ve known Dan Seifert a long time, and I can’t remember a time when he has only had one phone. This is partly an occupational hazard: Dan runs The Verge’s reviews team, so his home seems to frequently resemble a terrifying cross between a Best Buy and a FedEx warehouse. But Dan’s also just a multiple-device kind of guy, because the other thing I can’t remember is when there was one device that did everything he needed.