The best apps download superpowers to your smartphone. The Verge covers the new and noteworthy Android apps, iPhone apps, and games, highlighting great design, impressive utility, and novel features. If it belongs on your phone, you’ll find it on The Verge.
Featured stories
Arc’s live calendar button makes it hard to miss your next meeting
Now Arc can present you with a one-click join button for your next meeting so you don’t have to open Google Calendar.
Yahoo resurrects Artifact inside a new AI-powered News app
After acquiring the technology behind the Artifact app, Yahoo is launching an AI-powered personalized news app of its own.
Apple Intelligence, iPhones, and the rest of WWDC 2024
On The Vergecast: Apple makes its AI move, and all the new stuff coming to your phone, tablet, laptop, watch, and TV this year.
Apple is announcing the new feature at WWDC 2024 on Monday, according to MacRumors. It would work with built-in apps like Mail, Notes, or Messages, adding another layer of security to the phone in addition to Apple’s Stolen Device Protection setting that rolled out last year.
The Android 15 beta has something similar in “private space,” a lockable section of the app drawer.
An AI PC you’ll want to tinker with
Plus, in this week’s Installer: a hit movie about a hit man, an FBI tech caper, an app for managing media, and much more.
It debuted on June 1st, 1999, and shut down two years later.
Its name lived on as a Best Buy brand, a re-named Rhapsody streaming service, and an attempt to cash in on NFT hype. But in my heart, it will always be a search engine for poorly-labeled, low-quality MP3s that take hours to download over AOL dial-up internet.
This Reddit user’s Midjourney images in the style of bad photos from Yelp reviews are surprisingly on point. The prompt they say they used:
iPhone photo of (food name) with many raisins on top. At a (type of) restaurant (or other location). —ar 3:4 —style raw —s 75
PLUS —sref of some bad food photos you find on Yelp! :)
Others gave it a shot on X.
A better way to take video on your phone
Plus, in this week’s Installer: a Fitbit for kids, a MoviePass documentary, a better AirTag for your wallet, and much more.
This walking app let me whack my co-workers with a baseball bat
Stompers is what you’d get if you mixed together step counting, Looney Tunes, and Mario Kart.
Dream Jelly’s perspective as a middle schooler during the early years of iPhone apps is a fresh and fun take on smartphone history. Watch for the nostalgia, stay for the funny anecdote about using the “Fake a call” app on an iPod Touch in a Hollister.
The Apple TV app is available in Apple’s ecosystem, Windows, and some smart TV platforms, and that’s about it.
But now Apple is seeking an Android engineer to “help build an application used by millions to watch and discover tv and sports.” Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman believes company is preparing to bring Apple TV Plus to Android phones.
While the issue seems fixed today, Reddit users reported that and other problems, like videos that couldn’t be unmuted, in a thread spotted by 9to5Google. The solution was apparently disabling ad blockers. We saw the same behavior at The Verge.
It’s not clear if this was related to YouTube’s ongoing crackdown on ad blockers, or problems with the ad blockers themselves.