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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.

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Halide now offers special Action Button features when you’re inside the app.

When you’re using Halide, the Action Button on the iPhone 15 Pro phones can now, according to the app’s patch notes for version 2.13:

Toggle manual or autofocus

Cycle through your lenses

Switch between auto and manual exposure modes

Switch between 12 and 48MP capture modes

Toggle RAW capture

and even capture a photo! (though, with a delay - we suggest using the volume button instead)

There are more details in the patch notes, so I encourage you to read them for yourself. Using a Shortcut, you can also use the Action Button to open up Halide, too.


We love a good home screen.

Inspired by X CEO Linda Yaccarino flashing her home screen during her Code Conference interview, many of my colleagues at The Verge have been sharing their own home screens on Threads.

The fools! Now I’ve collected them and put them into a gallery here for all to see. (Don’t worry, I included my own.)

Anyway, did you get in on this bit? Share a link to yours in the comments! Or don’t. I’m not your boss.


A screenshot of an iPhone homescreen.

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Alex Cranz loves weather.
Screenshot: Alex Cranz

The best Google alternative I’ve tried yet

Plus, in this week’s Installer: Meta’s new headset, a true crime tech show, a battery-saving tool, and Baldur’s Gate 3.

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The best way to share things between iOS and Android is going away.

OnePlus is shutting down its Clipt app at the end of September. Clipt was a cloud clipboard service with apps for Android and iOS and a Chrome extension. If you used both an Android phone and iOS or Mac (like say, oh I don’t know, ME), it made it extremely easy to share links, text, and even files and images between your phone and an iPhone, iPad, or desktop computer, almost like a cross platform AirDrop or Continuity.

But since all good things must end, OnePlus is apparently shutting down the team that built and supports Clipt.

Anyone got any cross-platform cloud clipboard recommendations that don’t suck?


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Vivaldi’s ultra-customizable web browser is now available on iOS.

Starting today, iPhone and iPad users running iOS 15 / iPadOS 15 or later can now download the Vivaldi web browser and access its built-in notes tool and desktop-style tabs that make it easy to manage and switch between open, private, recently closed, or synced browsing sessions.


The CEO of Bumble says that the metaverse is “kind of contrary to everything I believe in in terms of getting humans to look each other in the eye.”

Roblox CEO David Baszucki thinks people will be dating in Roblox, but at Code 2023, Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd doesn’t sound like a fan of that idea. “Maybe that is how people will originally connect,” she said, but noted that “I will be much more sad for humanity than myself if people just stop really meeting in real life.”


Bumble is exploring more expensive subscription tiers.

Whitney Wolfe Herd, founder and CEO of Bumble, talked at Code 2023 about how the company is thinking about more pricey subscription tiers that would come with more features.

She declined to give an estimate on price — hopefully it’s not as high as Tinder’s $499 per month plan! — but she said how it could offer things like AI-powered features to help you find better matches.


Don’t expect federation to come to Artifact’s new posts feature — but Mike Krieger likes some of what federation can do.

“I love the idea of portability,” he said at Code, but has some hesitations with what specific standards can do right now. We’ll see if Threads can pull federation off.


Artifact is focused a little less on headlines now.

According to co-founder Mike Krieger at Code 2023, he’s a little more interested in things like long reads or product reviews. That makes some sense given the algorithmic focus of Artifact — it’s not quite as focused on up-to-the-second news.


Posts about Teenage Engineering are popular thing on Artifact, apparently.

That’s according to Mike Krieger, one of the co-founders of Artifact, who is onstage at Code 2023. I get it!


Look how they massacred my boy.

Somewhere, someone’s in front of an i-device thinking aloud: “I wanna play Baldur’s Gate 3.”

App Store developer Initial Link appears and answers, “We have Baldur’s Gate 3 at home,” and shows them Nevermore: Idle Immortal RPG... an idle RPG gacha game complete with a harrowing App Store icon that features a yassified Astarion!

From what I can tell this game has absolutely nothing to do with Baldur’s Gate, fortunately people of the Apple persuasion need not despair as Baldur’s Gate 3 just released on Mac last week.


Screenshot of an App Store icon for Nevermore: Idle Immortal RPG

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Yassified Astarion is unfortunately real and he can hurt you.
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How Uber learned to stop fighting and play nice with taxis

Uber is listing more and more taxi drivers in its app, most recently in Los Angeles. How did the two sides come together? In short, money.

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Evernote may be shifting legacy users onto its pricier, newer plans.

A reader tipped us off that Evernote, which was acquired by Bending Spoons, had informed them that their Evernote Plus plan had been shifted to an Evernote Personal plan instead. Here’s an excerpt from the email they shared with us:

Going forward, the cost of your Monthly subscription will be updated to match the current Evernote Personal subscription price of 14.99 USD per Month. This price will take effect on your next renewal, 10/19/2023.

Long-time subscribers at The Verge haven’t received this email. Users on Reddit have reported receiving similar messages, though some have been told by Evernote support that the switch was a mistake.

We’ve reached out to Evernote for confirmation.


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Your SwiftKey (and Samsung) keyboard might now have baked-in DALL-E.

AI-generated imagery is the new clip art, and Microsoft’s now making it dead easy to add to your chats — just swipe and type in SwiftKey to generate AI art on iPhone or Android.

Samsung’s keyboard has SwiftKey under the hood, so this is likely coming to a lot of phones. Microsoft’s also rolling out some “AI stickers” and “AI camera lenses,” but they’re pretty meh right now.


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Widget spinner.

Christian Selig, the creator of the now-shuttered Apollo app for Reddit, has a devious new widget for his Pixel Pals app. And he says that it’s the “smallest hint of the fun to come.”