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The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on all things vertical video, follow David Pierce. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.

For a while, every social and media platform had its own identity. YouTube was for clips of TV shows and movies, and the home of so many members of a burgeoning creator community. Instagram was mostly pictures. Netflix was trying to be the on-demand HBO. Facebook was about friends. Twitter was about news. Snapchat was a messaging app.

All these apps did have one important thing in common, though: They were growing up alongside the smartphone. Billions of new people were coming online for the first time, and they began to make content that made sense for the tall, skinny new devices in their hands. Selfies were a vertical art form, both because the photos filled the screen better and because it was just easier to hold the phone and take the photo that way. Some resisted the idea of vertical video for years — they’d argue that our eyes are meant to scan horizontally rather than vertically, and that vertical video looked bad on widescreen laptops. But ultimately phones won, and we hold our phones upright, so our phone experiences turned upright. That includes entertainment.

As has been true so many times, Snap figured this out before anyone. It launched Stories in late 2013 as a slightly more relaxed way to see what your friends are up to. CEO Evan Spiegel called it a “totally new way to share your day with friends — or everyone.” It took off in a massive way, and by the middle of 2014 was the most popular feature on Snapchat. That’s the kind of virality that Mark Zuckerberg tends to notice, and by August of 2016, the feature had been copied more or less exactly into Instagram. Kevin Systrom, then the CEO of Instagram, said of Spiegel and Snapchat that “they deserve all the credit” for Stories. The implication? That this was no longer a proprietary feature of a single social network; it was just in the air. Stories were for everyone. They started showing up on LinkedIn, Tinder, Medium, and so many other places.

Stories weren’t always video, but as cameras and upload speeds improved, video became the dominant medium in many ephemeral spaces. And video stories had two semi-magical properties: They were perfectly suited to endless, mindless scrolling, and they made it really easy to integrate ads. Only a few months after turning on Stories in Instagram, by which point half the platform’s users were already using Stories, Facebook began flooding ads into the product. The semi-randomness of Stories made ads actually seem less intrusive — you’d see a photo of a dog, a video of a hike, an ad for jeans, your friend’s makeup routine, brunch pics, an ad for blush. Video ads felt more premium, took up the whole screen, and were thus far more lucrative for the social platforms.

With apologies to the short, brilliant life of Vine, the six-second video platform that helped invent so much about the video-first social network, it wasn’t until TikTok took off that things really turned again. The platform launched in the US in 2018, but had been popular for a few years in China as Douyin and elsewhere as Musical.ly. TikTok combined the vertical-first format of Stories with the permanence of YouTube, but it also made video easier than ever. It had filters like Instagram and Snapchat, but also supplied a steady stream of video ideas through the platform’s many trends, offered access to music and sound effects, and made it easy to stitch or duet a video.

By defaulting to the purely algorithmic For You page, TikTok also freed creators from caring about curating their profile or worrying about posting too much — you could just pump out videos and trust the algorithm to deliver them. And so that’s what people did. Pretty quickly, TikTok became one of the fastest growing apps on the planet, and its daily usage numbers became the envy of the industry. Instagram may have had more users, but TikTok users spent far more time TikToking.

When TikTok became a phenomenon, just about everyone jumped on the vertical video bandwagon. Reels launched in 2020 and became a core feature of both Instagram and Facebook; YouTube created Shorts a year later. By the end of 2021, Twitter had both launched and killed a similar feature called Fleets. By this point, this kind of full-screen, vertical-scrolling video was part of the lingua franca of the smartphone. At the same time, in a search for ever more engagement, these platforms were learning another lesson from TikTok: to stop relying on your friends to post interesting content, and instead to show you whatever the algorithm thinks you might like. Social networks were gone, replaced by social media — entertainment with a comments section.

Short-form, vertical video has effectively won the internet. Business is booming, and viewers show no sign of tuning out. Meta said in 2024 that Instagram users were spending more than half their time in Reels, and said in 2025 the feature was turning into a $50 billion annual business across Meta’s apps. About 63 percent of young adults and teens are on TikTok, per Pew Research Center, and one in five teens reported being on the app “almost constantly.” YouTube reported 200 billion daily views of Shorts at the end of 2025, and said that Shorts earned more money per watch hour than standard YouTube videos.

The last three or four years have been about relentless standardization in social media. The pace with which these products copy each other, and regress back toward parity, has been absolutely astonishing. First, Shorts and Reels both aped TikTok’s design, its duetting and stitching, and its close relationship with sounds and music. Then they bought into TikTok’s idea of prioritizing content over connection — followers are dead, long live the algorithm. TikTok pushed hard into shopping, then suddenly Reels and Shorts became a lot more shoppable. YouTube began to grow on TVs, and suddenly TikTok and Instagram started investing in its own TV apps. Videos got longer and longer across platforms, to allow more ads. All the apps got really into livestreaming for a while. And micro dramas. They’ve relentlessly copied each other on big things like letting users control their algorithm, and small things like Clear Mode.

As the social platforms spin endlessly around each other, they’ve gotten some surprising company. Company after company started to notice their content floating around social media platforms, often in dubiously legal ways, and tried to take some of the watch time for themselves. Spotify decided it, too, wanted to be a video service, and built a vertical-scrolling feed for users to explore. Disney built a TikTok clone for ESPN and another for Disney Plus, both called Verts. Netflix, Prime Video, and Paramount Plus all called their clones Clips.

There are two reasons for the ongoing onslaught of short-form vertical video: time spent and advertising. The endlessly scrolling video feed turns out to be one of the most engrossing forms of entertainment ever devised (to the point that it has become a regulatory problem for the social platforms), and in a relentless competition for eyeballs and attention, it has become everyone’s best idea. In 2024, when Meta switched its default video player to a vertical-first layout across all platforms, the race was officially won.

Meanwhile, as those platforms have captured more of our time and attention, short-form video has become a dominant force of advertising on the internet, which means advertisers are already comfortable making ads designed to go between videos in the feed. And as so many companies turn to AI to do their ad targeting, all they really need is the creative to get started. “So long as clients give us different assets — a six-second ad, a 15-second ad, a long-format, a vertical ad — AI is essentially powering everything else,” YouTube’s Brian Albert told me last year. “From the audiences you’re reaching, to the contextual placements, to the ad that’s actually showing.” The combination of AI and vertical video has become a self-fulfilling prophecy: The more it wins, the easier it becomes for everyone else to get on board, and so it just keeps winning.

Vertical video haters, I have bad news: It’s only going to get worse. TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram are if anything going to become more short-form and vertical, since those short videos are easier to make and easier to load into endlessly scrolling feeds. Video services used to require you to pick something and press play, but now all they need is for you to open the app and they can start showing you ads. They’re not going to want to go back. Here’s how dominant video is: Facebook is testing a new version of the app that loads a full-screen video feed when you open the app. If that happens, there will be no Facebook — only Reels. After all this time, they’ve trained users to want and expect this kind of fast-paced, instant-gratification entertainment, to the point where even a full-length movie can feel like a chore.

Meanwhile, after years of raising prices, streaming services around the world are hoping they can turn to advertising to keep growing. For a while, they could coast on the back of linear TV, borrowing those ads to run on digital platforms. But a TikTok ad won’t make any sense on Netflix, so Netflix decided the best thing to do is build something that looks more like TikTok. A recent HubSpot report found that short-form video was by a wide margin both the most-used and most successful form of marketing content in 2025, and that it was the format in which marketers planned to invest the most this year.

All that said, there are glimmers of a bigger shift beginning to happen. Fed up with the algorithm, some users are starting to demand the return of friends and family in social media. But more broadly, more and more young people are deciding to put down their phones, resist the invasion of AI into their lives, and look for different kinds of entertainment. Movie theaters are having a big year; one of the year’s most exciting new phones is a flip phone. As long as we live in this era of social media and entertainment, vertical video is going to win. It would take a cultural revolution to stop it — and there might just be one brewing.

  • The best way to understand TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat in particular right now is as a combination of two things: a streaming service and an inbox. Studies have found that the most popular thing to do is watch videos, and the second most popular thing is to send videos to someone else. Actually posting? Way down the list. (YouTube, by the way, is desperately trying to make DMs happen.)
  • If you’ve made it this far and you’re thinking, no way, you’re way overstating it? I’m so sorry to say this, but you might just be old. At this point, YouTube and Facebook cross generations and demographics, but Pew and others have found that TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram are effectively ubiquitous among young people in particular.
  • It’s important to remember that views are lies. Everyone on the internet has an incentive to make their platform seem big and vibrant and popular, and they will invent whatever new metrics they need to do so.
  • New York published a great piece earlier this year about the shifting vibes on YouTube, and the ways in which the creator economy is being unmoored in part by the shift to vertical video. Yeah, the platforms have figured out how to make money from your video feed, but it’s not as simple for creators.
  • All the way back in 2015, The New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo made a good case for vertical video. It’s a fun reminder of just how contentious the idea was!
  • You should read my colleague Mia Sato’s story on the clip economy, which turns shows, movies, podcasts, and more into bite-size pieces for social platforms. It’s a weird industry, but it works — and you can see why the streamers want to compete.
  • Here’s a really good breakdown of all the things TikTok got right, from its algorithm to its whole approach to content. Every bit of it has been copied relentlessly ever since.
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.
#vertical #video #takeoverColumn,Creators,Facebook,Instagram,Meta,Social Media,Streaming,Tech,The Stepback,TikTok,YouTube"> The vertical video takeover is hereThis is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on all things vertical video, follow David Pierce. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.For a while, every social and media platform had its own identity. YouTube was for clips of TV shows and movies, and the home of so many members of a burgeoning creator community. Instagram was mostly pictures. Netflix was trying to be the on-demand HBO. Facebook was about friends. Twitter was about news. Snapchat was a messaging app.All these apps did have one important thing in common, though: They were growing up alongside the smartphone. Billions of new people were coming online for the first time, and they began to make content that made sense for the tall, skinny new devices in their hands. Selfies were a vertical art form, both because the photos filled the screen better and because it was just easier to hold the phone and take the photo that way. Some resisted the idea of vertical video for years — they’d argue that our eyes are meant to scan horizontally rather than vertically, and that vertical video looked bad on widescreen laptops. But ultimately phones won, and we hold our phones upright, so our phone experiences turned upright. That includes entertainment.As has been true so many times, Snap figured this out before anyone. It launched Stories in late 2013 as a slightly more relaxed way to see what your friends are up to. CEO Evan Spiegel called it a “totally new way to share your day with friends — or everyone.” It took off in a massive way, and by the middle of 2014 was the most popular feature on Snapchat. That’s the kind of virality that Mark Zuckerberg tends to notice, and by August of 2016, the feature had been copied more or less exactly into Instagram. Kevin Systrom, then the CEO of Instagram, said of Spiegel and Snapchat that “they deserve all the credit” for Stories. The implication? That this was no longer a proprietary feature of a single social network; it was just in the air. Stories were for everyone. They started showing up on LinkedIn, Tinder, Medium, and so many other places.Stories weren’t always video, but as cameras and upload speeds improved, video became the dominant medium in many ephemeral spaces. And video stories had two semi-magical properties: They were perfectly suited to endless, mindless scrolling, and they made it really easy to integrate ads. Only a few months after turning on Stories in Instagram, by which point half the platform’s users were already using Stories, Facebook began flooding ads into the product. The semi-randomness of Stories made ads actually seem less intrusive — you’d see a photo of a dog, a video of a hike, an ad for jeans, your friend’s makeup routine, brunch pics, an ad for blush. Video ads felt more premium, took up the whole screen, and were thus far more lucrative for the social platforms.With apologies to the short, brilliant life of Vine, the six-second video platform that helped invent so much about the video-first social network, it wasn’t until TikTok took off that things really turned again. The platform launched in the US in 2018, but had been popular for a few years in China as Douyin and elsewhere as Musical.ly. TikTok combined the vertical-first format of Stories with the permanence of YouTube, but it also made video easier than ever. It had filters like Instagram and Snapchat, but also supplied a steady stream of video ideas through the platform’s many trends, offered access to music and sound effects, and made it easy to stitch or duet a video.By defaulting to the purely algorithmic For You page, TikTok also freed creators from caring about curating their profile or worrying about posting too much — you could just pump out videos and trust the algorithm to deliver them. And so that’s what people did. Pretty quickly, TikTok became one of the fastest growing apps on the planet, and its daily usage numbers became the envy of the industry. Instagram may have had more users, but TikTok users spent far more time TikToking.When TikTok became a phenomenon, just about everyone jumped on the vertical video bandwagon. Reels launched in 2020 and became a core feature of both Instagram and Facebook; YouTube created Shorts a year later. By the end of 2021, Twitter had both launched and killed a similar feature called Fleets. By this point, this kind of full-screen, vertical-scrolling video was part of the lingua franca of the smartphone. At the same time, in a search for ever more engagement, these platforms were learning another lesson from TikTok: to stop relying on your friends to post interesting content, and instead to show you whatever the algorithm thinks you might like. Social networks were gone, replaced by social media — entertainment with a comments section.Short-form, vertical video has effectively won the internet. Business is booming, and viewers show no sign of tuning out. Meta said in 2024 that Instagram users were spending more than half their time in Reels, and said in 2025 the feature was turning into a billion annual business across Meta’s apps. About 63 percent of young adults and teens are on TikTok, per Pew Research Center, and one in five teens reported being on the app “almost constantly.” YouTube reported 200 billion daily views of Shorts at the end of 2025, and said that Shorts earned more money per watch hour than standard YouTube videos.The last three or four years have been about relentless standardization in social media. The pace with which these products copy each other, and regress back toward parity, has been absolutely astonishing. First, Shorts and Reels both aped TikTok’s design, its duetting and stitching, and its close relationship with sounds and music. Then they bought into TikTok’s idea of prioritizing content over connection — followers are dead, long live the algorithm. TikTok pushed hard into shopping, then suddenly Reels and Shorts became a lot more shoppable. YouTube began to grow on TVs, and suddenly TikTok and Instagram started investing in its own TV apps. Videos got longer and longer across platforms, to allow more ads. All the apps got really into livestreaming for a while. And micro dramas. They’ve relentlessly copied each other on big things like letting users control their algorithm, and small things like Clear Mode.As the social platforms spin endlessly around each other, they’ve gotten some surprising company. Company after company started to notice their content floating around social media platforms, often in dubiously legal ways, and tried to take some of the watch time for themselves. Spotify decided it, too, wanted to be a video service, and built a vertical-scrolling feed for users to explore. Disney built a TikTok clone for ESPN and another for Disney Plus, both called Verts. Netflix, Prime Video, and Paramount Plus all called their clones Clips.There are two reasons for the ongoing onslaught of short-form vertical video: time spent and advertising. The endlessly scrolling video feed turns out to be one of the most engrossing forms of entertainment ever devised (to the point that it has become a regulatory problem for the social platforms), and in a relentless competition for eyeballs and attention, it has become everyone’s best idea. In 2024, when Meta switched its default video player to a vertical-first layout across all platforms, the race was officially won.Meanwhile, as those platforms have captured more of our time and attention, short-form video has become a dominant force of advertising on the internet, which means advertisers are already comfortable making ads designed to go between videos in the feed. And as so many companies turn to AI to do their ad targeting, all they really need is the creative to get started. “So long as clients give us different assets — a six-second ad, a 15-second ad, a long-format, a vertical ad — AI is essentially powering everything else,” YouTube’s Brian Albert told me last year. “From the audiences you’re reaching, to the contextual placements, to the ad that’s actually showing.” The combination of AI and vertical video has become a self-fulfilling prophecy: The more it wins, the easier it becomes for everyone else to get on board, and so it just keeps winning.Vertical video haters, I have bad news: It’s only going to get worse. TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram are if anything going to become more short-form and vertical, since those short videos are easier to make and easier to load into endlessly scrolling feeds. Video services used to require you to pick something and press play, but now all they need is for you to open the app and they can start showing you ads. They’re not going to want to go back. Here’s how dominant video is: Facebook is testing a new version of the app that loads a full-screen video feed when you open the app. If that happens, there will be no Facebook — only Reels. After all this time, they’ve trained users to want and expect this kind of fast-paced, instant-gratification entertainment, to the point where even a full-length movie can feel like a chore.Meanwhile, after years of raising prices, streaming services around the world are hoping they can turn to advertising to keep growing. For a while, they could coast on the back of linear TV, borrowing those ads to run on digital platforms. But a TikTok ad won’t make any sense on Netflix, so Netflix decided the best thing to do is build something that looks more like TikTok. A recent HubSpot report found that short-form video was by a wide margin both the most-used and most successful form of marketing content in 2025, and that it was the format in which marketers planned to invest the most this year.All that said, there are glimmers of a bigger shift beginning to happen. Fed up with the algorithm, some users are starting to demand the return of friends and family in social media. But more broadly, more and more young people are deciding to put down their phones, resist the invasion of AI into their lives, and look for different kinds of entertainment. Movie theaters are having a big year; one of the year’s most exciting new phones is a flip phone. As long as we live in this era of social media and entertainment, vertical video is going to win. It would take a cultural revolution to stop it — and there might just be one brewing.The best way to understand TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat in particular right now is as a combination of two things: a streaming service and an inbox. Studies have found that the most popular thing to do is watch videos, and the second most popular thing is to send videos to someone else. Actually posting? Way down the list. (YouTube, by the way, is desperately trying to make DMs happen.)If you’ve made it this far and you’re thinking, no way, you’re way overstating it? I’m so sorry to say this, but you might just be old. At this point, YouTube and Facebook cross generations and demographics, but Pew and others have found that TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram are effectively ubiquitous among young people in particular.It’s important to remember that views are lies. Everyone on the internet has an incentive to make their platform seem big and vibrant and popular, and they will invent whatever new metrics they need to do so.New York published a great piece earlier this year about the shifting vibes on YouTube, and the ways in which the creator economy is being unmoored in part by the shift to vertical video. Yeah, the platforms have figured out how to make money from your video feed, but it’s not as simple for creators. All the way back in 2015, The New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo made a good case for vertical video. It’s a fun reminder of just how contentious the idea was!You should read my colleague Mia Sato’s story on the clip economy, which turns shows, movies, podcasts, and more into bite-size pieces for social platforms. It’s a weird industry, but it works — and you can see why the streamers want to compete.Here’s a really good breakdown of all the things TikTok got right, from its algorithm to its whole approach to content. Every bit of it has been copied relentlessly ever since.Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.David PierceCloseDavid PiercePosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by David PierceColumnCloseColumnPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All ColumnCreatorsCloseCreatorsPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All CreatorsFacebookCloseFacebookPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All FacebookInstagramCloseInstagramPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All InstagramMetaCloseMetaPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All MetaSocial MediaCloseSocial MediaPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All Social MediaStreamingCloseStreamingPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All StreamingTechCloseTechPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All TechThe StepbackCloseThe StepbackPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All The StepbackTikTokCloseTikTokPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All TikTokYouTubeCloseYouTubePosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All YouTube#vertical #video #takeoverColumn,Creators,Facebook,Instagram,Meta,Social Media,Streaming,Tech,The Stepback,TikTok,YouTube
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The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on all things vertical video, follow David Pierce. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.

For a while, every social and media platform had its own identity. YouTube was for clips of TV shows and movies, and the home of so many members of a burgeoning creator community. Instagram was mostly pictures. Netflix was trying to be the on-demand HBO. Facebook was about friends. Twitter was about news. Snapchat was a messaging app.

All these apps did have one important thing in common, though: They were growing up alongside the smartphone. Billions of new people were coming online for the first time, and they began to make content that made sense for the tall, skinny new devices in their hands. Selfies were a vertical art form, both because the photos filled the screen better and because it was just easier to hold the phone and take the photo that way. Some resisted the idea of vertical video for years — they’d argue that our eyes are meant to scan horizontally rather than vertically, and that vertical video looked bad on widescreen laptops. But ultimately phones won, and we hold our phones upright, so our phone experiences turned upright. That includes entertainment.

As has been true so many times, Snap figured this out before anyone. It launched Stories in late 2013 as a slightly more relaxed way to see what your friends are up to. CEO Evan Spiegel called it a “totally new way to share your day with friends — or everyone.” It took off in a massive way, and by the middle of 2014 was the most popular feature on Snapchat. That’s the kind of virality that Mark Zuckerberg tends to notice, and by August of 2016, the feature had been copied more or less exactly into Instagram. Kevin Systrom, then the CEO of Instagram, said of Spiegel and Snapchat that “they deserve all the credit” for Stories. The implication? That this was no longer a proprietary feature of a single social network; it was just in the air. Stories were for everyone. They started showing up on LinkedIn, Tinder, Medium, and so many other places.

Stories weren’t always video, but as cameras and upload speeds improved, video became the dominant medium in many ephemeral spaces. And video stories had two semi-magical properties: They were perfectly suited to endless, mindless scrolling, and they made it really easy to integrate ads. Only a few months after turning on Stories in Instagram, by which point half the platform’s users were already using Stories, Facebook began flooding ads into the product. The semi-randomness of Stories made ads actually seem less intrusive — you’d see a photo of a dog, a video of a hike, an ad for jeans, your friend’s makeup routine, brunch pics, an ad for blush. Video ads felt more premium, took up the whole screen, and were thus far more lucrative for the social platforms.

With apologies to the short, brilliant life of Vine, the six-second video platform that helped invent so much about the video-first social network, it wasn’t until TikTok took off that things really turned again. The platform launched in the US in 2018, but had been popular for a few years in China as Douyin and elsewhere as Musical.ly. TikTok combined the vertical-first format of Stories with the permanence of YouTube, but it also made video easier than ever. It had filters like Instagram and Snapchat, but also supplied a steady stream of video ideas through the platform’s many trends, offered access to music and sound effects, and made it easy to stitch or duet a video.

By defaulting to the purely algorithmic For You page, TikTok also freed creators from caring about curating their profile or worrying about posting too much — you could just pump out videos and trust the algorithm to deliver them. And so that’s what people did. Pretty quickly, TikTok became one of the fastest growing apps on the planet, and its daily usage numbers became the envy of the industry. Instagram may have had more users, but TikTok users spent far more time TikToking.

When TikTok became a phenomenon, just about everyone jumped on the vertical video bandwagon. Reels launched in 2020 and became a core feature of both Instagram and Facebook; YouTube created Shorts a year later. By the end of 2021, Twitter had both launched and killed a similar feature called Fleets. By this point, this kind of full-screen, vertical-scrolling video was part of the lingua franca of the smartphone. At the same time, in a search for ever more engagement, these platforms were learning another lesson from TikTok: to stop relying on your friends to post interesting content, and instead to show you whatever the algorithm thinks you might like. Social networks were gone, replaced by social media — entertainment with a comments section.

Short-form, vertical video has effectively won the internet. Business is booming, and viewers show no sign of tuning out. Meta said in 2024 that Instagram users were spending more than half their time in Reels, and said in 2025 the feature was turning into a $50 billion annual business across Meta’s apps. About 63 percent of young adults and teens are on TikTok, per Pew Research Center, and one in five teens reported being on the app “almost constantly.” YouTube reported 200 billion daily views of Shorts at the end of 2025, and said that Shorts earned more money per watch hour than standard YouTube videos.

The last three or four years have been about relentless standardization in social media. The pace with which these products copy each other, and regress back toward parity, has been absolutely astonishing. First, Shorts and Reels both aped TikTok’s design, its duetting and stitching, and its close relationship with sounds and music. Then they bought into TikTok’s idea of prioritizing content over connection — followers are dead, long live the algorithm. TikTok pushed hard into shopping, then suddenly Reels and Shorts became a lot more shoppable. YouTube began to grow on TVs, and suddenly TikTok and Instagram started investing in its own TV apps. Videos got longer and longer across platforms, to allow more ads. All the apps got really into livestreaming for a while. And micro dramas. They’ve relentlessly copied each other on big things like letting users control their algorithm, and small things like Clear Mode.

As the social platforms spin endlessly around each other, they’ve gotten some surprising company. Company after company started to notice their content floating around social media platforms, often in dubiously legal ways, and tried to take some of the watch time for themselves. Spotify decided it, too, wanted to be a video service, and built a vertical-scrolling feed for users to explore. Disney built a TikTok clone for ESPN and another for Disney Plus, both called Verts. Netflix, Prime Video, and Paramount Plus all called their clones Clips.

There are two reasons for the ongoing onslaught of short-form vertical video: time spent and advertising. The endlessly scrolling video feed turns out to be one of the most engrossing forms of entertainment ever devised (to the point that it has become a regulatory problem for the social platforms), and in a relentless competition for eyeballs and attention, it has become everyone’s best idea. In 2024, when Meta switched its default video player to a vertical-first layout across all platforms, the race was officially won.

Meanwhile, as those platforms have captured more of our time and attention, short-form video has become a dominant force of advertising on the internet, which means advertisers are already comfortable making ads designed to go between videos in the feed. And as so many companies turn to AI to do their ad targeting, all they really need is the creative to get started. “So long as clients give us different assets — a six-second ad, a 15-second ad, a long-format, a vertical ad — AI is essentially powering everything else,” YouTube’s Brian Albert told me last year. “From the audiences you’re reaching, to the contextual placements, to the ad that’s actually showing.” The combination of AI and vertical video has become a self-fulfilling prophecy: The more it wins, the easier it becomes for everyone else to get on board, and so it just keeps winning.

Vertical video haters, I have bad news: It’s only going to get worse. TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram are if anything going to become more short-form and vertical, since those short videos are easier to make and easier to load into endlessly scrolling feeds. Video services used to require you to pick something and press play, but now all they need is for you to open the app and they can start showing you ads. They’re not going to want to go back. Here’s how dominant video is: Facebook is testing a new version of the app that loads a full-screen video feed when you open the app. If that happens, there will be no Facebook — only Reels. After all this time, they’ve trained users to want and expect this kind of fast-paced, instant-gratification entertainment, to the point where even a full-length movie can feel like a chore.

Meanwhile, after years of raising prices, streaming services around the world are hoping they can turn to advertising to keep growing. For a while, they could coast on the back of linear TV, borrowing those ads to run on digital platforms. But a TikTok ad won’t make any sense on Netflix, so Netflix decided the best thing to do is build something that looks more like TikTok. A recent HubSpot report found that short-form video was by a wide margin both the most-used and most successful form of marketing content in 2025, and that it was the format in which marketers planned to invest the most this year.

All that said, there are glimmers of a bigger shift beginning to happen. Fed up with the algorithm, some users are starting to demand the return of friends and family in social media. But more broadly, more and more young people are deciding to put down their phones, resist the invasion of AI into their lives, and look for different kinds of entertainment. Movie theaters are having a big year; one of the year’s most exciting new phones is a flip phone. As long as we live in this era of social media and entertainment, vertical video is going to win. It would take a cultural revolution to stop it — and there might just be one brewing.

  • The best way to understand TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat in particular right now is as a combination of two things: a streaming service and an inbox. Studies have found that the most popular thing to do is watch videos, and the second most popular thing is to send videos to someone else. Actually posting? Way down the list. (YouTube, by the way, is desperately trying to make DMs happen.)
  • If you’ve made it this far and you’re thinking, no way, you’re way overstating it? I’m so sorry to say this, but you might just be old. At this point, YouTube and Facebook cross generations and demographics, but Pew and others have found that TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram are effectively ubiquitous among young people in particular.
  • It’s important to remember that views are lies. Everyone on the internet has an incentive to make their platform seem big and vibrant and popular, and they will invent whatever new metrics they need to do so.
  • New York published a great piece earlier this year about the shifting vibes on YouTube, and the ways in which the creator economy is being unmoored in part by the shift to vertical video. Yeah, the platforms have figured out how to make money from your video feed, but it’s not as simple for creators.
  • All the way back in 2015, The New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo made a good case for vertical video. It’s a fun reminder of just how contentious the idea was!
  • You should read my colleague Mia Sato’s story on the clip economy, which turns shows, movies, podcasts, and more into bite-size pieces for social platforms. It’s a weird industry, but it works — and you can see why the streamers want to compete.
  • Here’s a really good breakdown of all the things TikTok got right, from its algorithm to its whole approach to content. Every bit of it has been copied relentlessly ever since.
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.

#vertical #video #takeoverColumn,Creators,Facebook,Instagram,Meta,Social Media,Streaming,Tech,The Stepback,TikTok,YouTube">The vertical video takeover is here

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on all things vertical video, follow David Pierce. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.

For a while, every social and media platform had its own identity. YouTube was for clips of TV shows and movies, and the home of so many members of a burgeoning creator community. Instagram was mostly pictures. Netflix was trying to be the on-demand HBO. Facebook was about friends. Twitter was about news. Snapchat was a messaging app.

All these apps did have one important thing in common, though: They were growing up alongside the smartphone. Billions of new people were coming online for the first time, and they began to make content that made sense for the tall, skinny new devices in their hands. Selfies were a vertical art form, both because the photos filled the screen better and because it was just easier to hold the phone and take the photo that way. Some resisted the idea of vertical video for years — they’d argue that our eyes are meant to scan horizontally rather than vertically, and that vertical video looked bad on widescreen laptops. But ultimately phones won, and we hold our phones upright, so our phone experiences turned upright. That includes entertainment.

As has been true so many times, Snap figured this out before anyone. It launched Stories in late 2013 as a slightly more relaxed way to see what your friends are up to. CEO Evan Spiegel called it a “totally new way to share your day with friends — or everyone.” It took off in a massive way, and by the middle of 2014 was the most popular feature on Snapchat. That’s the kind of virality that Mark Zuckerberg tends to notice, and by August of 2016, the feature had been copied more or less exactly into Instagram. Kevin Systrom, then the CEO of Instagram, said of Spiegel and Snapchat that “they deserve all the credit” for Stories. The implication? That this was no longer a proprietary feature of a single social network; it was just in the air. Stories were for everyone. They started showing up on LinkedIn, Tinder, Medium, and so many other places.

Stories weren’t always video, but as cameras and upload speeds improved, video became the dominant medium in many ephemeral spaces. And video stories had two semi-magical properties: They were perfectly suited to endless, mindless scrolling, and they made it really easy to integrate ads. Only a few months after turning on Stories in Instagram, by which point half the platform’s users were already using Stories, Facebook began flooding ads into the product. The semi-randomness of Stories made ads actually seem less intrusive — you’d see a photo of a dog, a video of a hike, an ad for jeans, your friend’s makeup routine, brunch pics, an ad for blush. Video ads felt more premium, took up the whole screen, and were thus far more lucrative for the social platforms.

With apologies to the short, brilliant life of Vine, the six-second video platform that helped invent so much about the video-first social network, it wasn’t until TikTok took off that things really turned again. The platform launched in the US in 2018, but had been popular for a few years in China as Douyin and elsewhere as Musical.ly. TikTok combined the vertical-first format of Stories with the permanence of YouTube, but it also made video easier than ever. It had filters like Instagram and Snapchat, but also supplied a steady stream of video ideas through the platform’s many trends, offered access to music and sound effects, and made it easy to stitch or duet a video.

By defaulting to the purely algorithmic For You page, TikTok also freed creators from caring about curating their profile or worrying about posting too much — you could just pump out videos and trust the algorithm to deliver them. And so that’s what people did. Pretty quickly, TikTok became one of the fastest growing apps on the planet, and its daily usage numbers became the envy of the industry. Instagram may have had more users, but TikTok users spent far more time TikToking.

When TikTok became a phenomenon, just about everyone jumped on the vertical video bandwagon. Reels launched in 2020 and became a core feature of both Instagram and Facebook; YouTube created Shorts a year later. By the end of 2021, Twitter had both launched and killed a similar feature called Fleets. By this point, this kind of full-screen, vertical-scrolling video was part of the lingua franca of the smartphone. At the same time, in a search for ever more engagement, these platforms were learning another lesson from TikTok: to stop relying on your friends to post interesting content, and instead to show you whatever the algorithm thinks you might like. Social networks were gone, replaced by social media — entertainment with a comments section.

Short-form, vertical video has effectively won the internet. Business is booming, and viewers show no sign of tuning out. Meta said in 2024 that Instagram users were spending more than half their time in Reels, and said in 2025 the feature was turning into a $50 billion annual business across Meta’s apps. About 63 percent of young adults and teens are on TikTok, per Pew Research Center, and one in five teens reported being on the app “almost constantly.” YouTube reported 200 billion daily views of Shorts at the end of 2025, and said that Shorts earned more money per watch hour than standard YouTube videos.

The last three or four years have been about relentless standardization in social media. The pace with which these products copy each other, and regress back toward parity, has been absolutely astonishing. First, Shorts and Reels both aped TikTok’s design, its duetting and stitching, and its close relationship with sounds and music. Then they bought into TikTok’s idea of prioritizing content over connection — followers are dead, long live the algorithm. TikTok pushed hard into shopping, then suddenly Reels and Shorts became a lot more shoppable. YouTube began to grow on TVs, and suddenly TikTok and Instagram started investing in its own TV apps. Videos got longer and longer across platforms, to allow more ads. All the apps got really into livestreaming for a while. And micro dramas. They’ve relentlessly copied each other on big things like letting users control their algorithm, and small things like Clear Mode.

As the social platforms spin endlessly around each other, they’ve gotten some surprising company. Company after company started to notice their content floating around social media platforms, often in dubiously legal ways, and tried to take some of the watch time for themselves. Spotify decided it, too, wanted to be a video service, and built a vertical-scrolling feed for users to explore. Disney built a TikTok clone for ESPN and another for Disney Plus, both called Verts. Netflix, Prime Video, and Paramount Plus all called their clones Clips.

There are two reasons for the ongoing onslaught of short-form vertical video: time spent and advertising. The endlessly scrolling video feed turns out to be one of the most engrossing forms of entertainment ever devised (to the point that it has become a regulatory problem for the social platforms), and in a relentless competition for eyeballs and attention, it has become everyone’s best idea. In 2024, when Meta switched its default video player to a vertical-first layout across all platforms, the race was officially won.

Meanwhile, as those platforms have captured more of our time and attention, short-form video has become a dominant force of advertising on the internet, which means advertisers are already comfortable making ads designed to go between videos in the feed. And as so many companies turn to AI to do their ad targeting, all they really need is the creative to get started. “So long as clients give us different assets — a six-second ad, a 15-second ad, a long-format, a vertical ad — AI is essentially powering everything else,” YouTube’s Brian Albert told me last year. “From the audiences you’re reaching, to the contextual placements, to the ad that’s actually showing.” The combination of AI and vertical video has become a self-fulfilling prophecy: The more it wins, the easier it becomes for everyone else to get on board, and so it just keeps winning.

Vertical video haters, I have bad news: It’s only going to get worse. TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram are if anything going to become more short-form and vertical, since those short videos are easier to make and easier to load into endlessly scrolling feeds. Video services used to require you to pick something and press play, but now all they need is for you to open the app and they can start showing you ads. They’re not going to want to go back. Here’s how dominant video is: Facebook is testing a new version of the app that loads a full-screen video feed when you open the app. If that happens, there will be no Facebook — only Reels. After all this time, they’ve trained users to want and expect this kind of fast-paced, instant-gratification entertainment, to the point where even a full-length movie can feel like a chore.

Meanwhile, after years of raising prices, streaming services around the world are hoping they can turn to advertising to keep growing. For a while, they could coast on the back of linear TV, borrowing those ads to run on digital platforms. But a TikTok ad won’t make any sense on Netflix, so Netflix decided the best thing to do is build something that looks more like TikTok. A recent HubSpot report found that short-form video was by a wide margin both the most-used and most successful form of marketing content in 2025, and that it was the format in which marketers planned to invest the most this year.

All that said, there are glimmers of a bigger shift beginning to happen. Fed up with the algorithm, some users are starting to demand the return of friends and family in social media. But more broadly, more and more young people are deciding to put down their phones, resist the invasion of AI into their lives, and look for different kinds of entertainment. Movie theaters are having a big year; one of the year’s most exciting new phones is a flip phone. As long as we live in this era of social media and entertainment, vertical video is going to win. It would take a cultural revolution to stop it — and there might just be one brewing.

  • The best way to understand TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat in particular right now is as a combination of two things: a streaming service and an inbox. Studies have found that the most popular thing to do is watch videos, and the second most popular thing is to send videos to someone else. Actually posting? Way down the list. (YouTube, by the way, is desperately trying to make DMs happen.)
  • If you’ve made it this far and you’re thinking, no way, you’re way overstating it? I’m so sorry to say this, but you might just be old. At this point, YouTube and Facebook cross generations and demographics, but Pew and others have found that TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram are effectively ubiquitous among young people in particular.
  • It’s important to remember that views are lies. Everyone on the internet has an incentive to make their platform seem big and vibrant and popular, and they will invent whatever new metrics they need to do so.
  • New York published a great piece earlier this year about the shifting vibes on YouTube, and the ways in which the creator economy is being unmoored in part by the shift to vertical video. Yeah, the platforms have figured out how to make money from your video feed, but it’s not as simple for creators.
  • All the way back in 2015, The New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo made a good case for vertical video. It’s a fun reminder of just how contentious the idea was!
  • You should read my colleague Mia Sato’s story on the clip economy, which turns shows, movies, podcasts, and more into bite-size pieces for social platforms. It’s a weird industry, but it works — and you can see why the streamers want to compete.
  • Here’s a really good breakdown of all the things TikTok got right, from its algorithm to its whole approach to content. Every bit of it has been copied relentlessly ever since.
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.
#vertical #video #takeoverColumn,Creators,Facebook,Instagram,Meta,Social Media,Streaming,Tech,The Stepback,TikTok,YouTube

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech…

constantly tracks your activity. The app also seems to have an odd hostility to playing actual albums. This all works to create a general feeling that Spotify’s designers are trying to push you into using the service in a particular way.

It’s understandable, then, that some people are annoyed with the way music videos have been added to the platform. For the most part, they would start to play by default, in the background, whenever an artist had uploaded a video for the song. Some music videos have very different audio from the original tracks, particularly if they include sketches or sound effects, which can prove distracting if you prefer the album version of the song. And even if you enjoy music videos (which I do), the decision to have videos play by default—using up bandwidth and battery power—upset a lot of people.

There are a few other quirks. On Spotify’s desktop app, the videos are barely visible; they stay contained in the tiny album art panel until you manage to find the hidden, extremely small Now playing button that enlarges them. Also, the selection of videos that are on the platform, and the ones that are mysteriously absent, seems totally random. Because of this, I check YouTube first when I really want to watch a music video.

The most annoying thing, though, had been a lack of any obvious way to disable all videos. That changed recently—there’s now a toggle in the settings to disable music videos in Spotify entirely, alongside controls that disable the Canvas feature (animated album art) and video podcasts.

On mobile you can do this by tapping your user profile icon in the top-left to bring up the side panel. Then tap Settings and privacy, followed by Content and display.

Image may contain Page Text Electronics Mobile Phone and Phone

Photograph: Justin Pot

In the Videos and Canvas section you will see three toggles: one for music videos, one for Canvas, and one for all other videos. This last toggle disables video podcasts, meaning you’ll get the audio-only version of podcasts instead. Turn all these off, and Spotify will use a lot less bandwidth.

On the desktop app, it’s a little different. Click your user profile icon in the top-right corner, then click Settings. Scroll down to the Videos and Canvas section to find the options to disable music videos and Canvas.

I tested this and it worked. The music video icon in playlists and albums disappeared, as did the collection of music videos on Artist pages. The only remnant of the disabled feature is a Switch to video button in the Now Playing sidebar, which appears below the album art. Click it and you’ll be told the video can’t play unless you turn videos back on in the settings. Odd, for sure, but for the most part turning this off means you don’t have to think about music videos in Spotify anymore.

I sincerely wish that Spotify would roll out music videos with more care. Sometimes I really do want to see a video—just not every time I play a track. Playlists of music videos might be welcome if they ran separately from the audio-only playlists. I just don’t want to get a music video when I’m looking for the album version of a song, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. I can only hope that Spotify’s future interface design choices will keep things more clearly separated.

#Disable #Music #Videos #Spotifyspotify,how-to,tips,software,streaming,ux/ui"> How to Disable Music Videos in SpotifySpotify, it’s fair to say, has made some weird user-experience choices.There are a number of panels in the app, and the layout is confusing. The service constantly tracks your activity. The app also seems to have an odd hostility to playing actual albums. This all works to create a general feeling that Spotify’s designers are trying to push you into using the service in a particular way.It’s understandable, then, that some people are annoyed with the way music videos have been added to the platform. For the most part, they would start to play by default, in the background, whenever an artist had uploaded a video for the song. Some music videos have very different audio from the original tracks, particularly if they include sketches or sound effects, which can prove distracting if you prefer the album version of the song. And even if you enjoy music videos (which I do), the decision to have videos play by default—using up bandwidth and battery power—upset a lot of people.There are a few other quirks. On Spotify’s desktop app, the videos are barely visible; they stay contained in the tiny album art panel until you manage to find the hidden, extremely small Now playing button that enlarges them. Also, the selection of videos that are on the platform, and the ones that are mysteriously absent, seems totally random. Because of this, I check YouTube first when I really want to watch a music video.The most annoying thing, though, had been a lack of any obvious way to disable all videos. That changed recently—there’s now a toggle in the settings to disable music videos in Spotify entirely, alongside controls that disable the Canvas feature (animated album art) and video podcasts.On mobile you can do this by tapping your user profile icon in the top-left to bring up the side panel. Then tap Settings and privacy, followed by Content and display.Photograph: Justin PotIn the Videos and Canvas section you will see three toggles: one for music videos, one for Canvas, and one for all other videos. This last toggle disables video podcasts, meaning you’ll get the audio-only version of podcasts instead. Turn all these off, and Spotify will use a lot less bandwidth.On the desktop app, it’s a little different. Click your user profile icon in the top-right corner, then click Settings. Scroll down to the Videos and Canvas section to find the options to disable music videos and Canvas.I tested this and it worked. The music video icon in playlists and albums disappeared, as did the collection of music videos on Artist pages. The only remnant of the disabled feature is a Switch to video button in the Now Playing sidebar, which appears below the album art. Click it and you’ll be told the video can’t play unless you turn videos back on in the settings. Odd, for sure, but for the most part turning this off means you don’t have to think about music videos in Spotify anymore.I sincerely wish that Spotify would roll out music videos with more care. Sometimes I really do want to see a video—just not every time I play a track. Playlists of music videos might be welcome if they ran separately from the audio-only playlists. I just don’t want to get a music video when I’m looking for the album version of a song, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. I can only hope that Spotify’s future interface design choices will keep things more clearly separated.#Disable #Music #Videos #Spotifyspotify,how-to,tips,software,streaming,ux/ui
Tech-news

constantly tracks your activity. The app also seems to have an odd hostility to playing actual albums. This all works to create a general feeling that Spotify’s designers are trying to push you into using the service in a particular way.

It’s understandable, then, that some people are annoyed with the way music videos have been added to the platform. For the most part, they would start to play by default, in the background, whenever an artist had uploaded a video for the song. Some music videos have very different audio from the original tracks, particularly if they include sketches or sound effects, which can prove distracting if you prefer the album version of the song. And even if you enjoy music videos (which I do), the decision to have videos play by default—using up bandwidth and battery power—upset a lot of people.

There are a few other quirks. On Spotify’s desktop app, the videos are barely visible; they stay contained in the tiny album art panel until you manage to find the hidden, extremely small Now playing button that enlarges them. Also, the selection of videos that are on the platform, and the ones that are mysteriously absent, seems totally random. Because of this, I check YouTube first when I really want to watch a music video.

The most annoying thing, though, had been a lack of any obvious way to disable all videos. That changed recently—there’s now a toggle in the settings to disable music videos in Spotify entirely, alongside controls that disable the Canvas feature (animated album art) and video podcasts.

On mobile you can do this by tapping your user profile icon in the top-left to bring up the side panel. Then tap Settings and privacy, followed by Content and display.

Image may contain Page Text Electronics Mobile Phone and Phone

Photograph: Justin Pot

In the Videos and Canvas section you will see three toggles: one for music videos, one for Canvas, and one for all other videos. This last toggle disables video podcasts, meaning you’ll get the audio-only version of podcasts instead. Turn all these off, and Spotify will use a lot less bandwidth.

On the desktop app, it’s a little different. Click your user profile icon in the top-right corner, then click Settings. Scroll down to the Videos and Canvas section to find the options to disable music videos and Canvas.

I tested this and it worked. The music video icon in playlists and albums disappeared, as did the collection of music videos on Artist pages. The only remnant of the disabled feature is a Switch to video button in the Now Playing sidebar, which appears below the album art. Click it and you’ll be told the video can’t play unless you turn videos back on in the settings. Odd, for sure, but for the most part turning this off means you don’t have to think about music videos in Spotify anymore.

I sincerely wish that Spotify would roll out music videos with more care. Sometimes I really do want to see a video—just not every time I play a track. Playlists of music videos might be welcome if they ran separately from the audio-only playlists. I just don’t want to get a music video when I’m looking for the album version of a song, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. I can only hope that Spotify’s future interface design choices will keep things more clearly separated.

#Disable #Music #Videos #Spotifyspotify,how-to,tips,software,streaming,ux/ui">How to Disable Music Videos in Spotify

Spotify, it’s fair to say, has made some weird user-experience choices.

There are a number of panels in the app, and the layout is confusing. The service constantly tracks your activity. The app also seems to have an odd hostility to playing actual albums. This all works to create a general feeling that Spotify’s designers are trying to push you into using the service in a particular way.

It’s understandable, then, that some people are annoyed with the way music videos have been added to the platform. For the most part, they would start to play by default, in the background, whenever an artist had uploaded a video for the song. Some music videos have very different audio from the original tracks, particularly if they include sketches or sound effects, which can prove distracting if you prefer the album version of the song. And even if you enjoy music videos (which I do), the decision to have videos play by default—using up bandwidth and battery power—upset a lot of people.

There are a few other quirks. On Spotify’s desktop app, the videos are barely visible; they stay contained in the tiny album art panel until you manage to find the hidden, extremely small Now playing button that enlarges them. Also, the selection of videos that are on the platform, and the ones that are mysteriously absent, seems totally random. Because of this, I check YouTube first when I really want to watch a music video.

The most annoying thing, though, had been a lack of any obvious way to disable all videos. That changed recently—there’s now a toggle in the settings to disable music videos in Spotify entirely, alongside controls that disable the Canvas feature (animated album art) and video podcasts.

On mobile you can do this by tapping your user profile icon in the top-left to bring up the side panel. Then tap Settings and privacy, followed by Content and display.

Image may contain Page Text Electronics Mobile Phone and Phone

Photograph: Justin Pot

In the Videos and Canvas section you will see three toggles: one for music videos, one for Canvas, and one for all other videos. This last toggle disables video podcasts, meaning you’ll get the audio-only version of podcasts instead. Turn all these off, and Spotify will use a lot less bandwidth.

On the desktop app, it’s a little different. Click your user profile icon in the top-right corner, then click Settings. Scroll down to the Videos and Canvas section to find the options to disable music videos and Canvas.

I tested this and it worked. The music video icon in playlists and albums disappeared, as did the collection of music videos on Artist pages. The only remnant of the disabled feature is a Switch to video button in the Now Playing sidebar, which appears below the album art. Click it and you’ll be told the video can’t play unless you turn videos back on in the settings. Odd, for sure, but for the most part turning this off means you don’t have to think about music videos in Spotify anymore.

I sincerely wish that Spotify would roll out music videos with more care. Sometimes I really do want to see a video—just not every time I play a track. Playlists of music videos might be welcome if they ran separately from the audio-only playlists. I just don’t want to get a music video when I’m looking for the album version of a song, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. I can only hope that Spotify’s future interface design choices will keep things more clearly separated.

#Disable #Music #Videos #Spotifyspotify,how-to,tips,software,streaming,ux/ui

Spotify, it’s fair to say, has made some weird user-experience choices.There are a number of…

Installer homepage.)

This week, I’ve been recording the next season of Version History (this season’s finale is out on Sunday!), reading about data center heists and Backyard Baseball and the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, canceling my October plans to see Digger 30 or 40 times, taking on the new Knockout Tour routes in Mario Kart World, learning more than I ever intended about Staten Island thanks to Revisionist History, reading up on the history of the very first chatbot, and setting up my Flipper Busy Bar. I love the thing, and have no idea what to use it for.

I also have for you the movie of the summer, a great update to a great note-taking app, a new app for organizing your photos, and much more. Let’s go.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you reading / watching / playing / listening to / soldering together this week? 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 Odyssey. I’ll be honest: I expected this movie to not be great. Hot director bites off too big a story, not even Christopher Nolan can hit every time, right? WRONG. The reviews are amazing, the whole thing actually feels very current, and I absolutely cannot wait to plant myself in an IMAX theater and soak in the epic-ness of this one. Several dozen times.
  • Bear 2.9. Bear’s tag-based system has always felt a little too limiting to me, but expanding the idea into Workspaces makes it way more powerful without being any more complex. So clever, so useful, still one of the best apps to write in across Apple devices.
  • The World Cup final. By just about any measure, Sunday’s game will be the biggest thing on TV… until we do this again in four years. This year’s tournament has been spectacular, and whether you like soccer or not, the final tends to be good TV. Treat it like the Super Bowl! Have a party!
  • “How Microtransactions (Almost) Ruined Gaming, with Dan Soder.” Really good episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out that makes an imperfect but very compelling argument that we have almost completely lost the plot when it comes to gaming. But the fight is not yet entirely lost.
  • Aphera. I’ve been hearing good things about this new Mac-based photo editor, which is fast and powerful and aimed directly at replacing the ever-rising price of Adobe’s tools. Ditching Lightroom is a lot to ask, but I’m excited to give this a real shot.
  • Parchment. Chris Lawley, friend of Installer, shipped his notes-and-tasks app for Apple devices this week, and it’s really well done! It goes hard on just showing you what matters right now and hiding everything else, and I kind of appreciate that.
  • The Loading Museum. What a fun idea: a repository of all the things that have made us wait on our computers. Watch a photo load like it’s 1997, remember what it felt like to wait for the internet to connect, and learn what designers have always known about how to make slow things feel faster.
  • The Codex Micro. I love a shortcut button, and while I think $230 is an absurd price to pay for a bunch of buttons you could re-create with a Stream Deck or any number of other things, I do think these agent-controlling keys are pretty delightful. Work Louder stuff just tends to feel good.

(Tiny housekeeping note: From now on, when we do a special section like this, it’ll be in place of Screen Share for that week. I’ve heard from a bunch of folks that some issues are actually too much, and this feels like a good trade that also makes my life easier. Win-win!)

They say reading is dead. They are, in fact, incorrect. A couple of weeks ago, I asked you all to share your reading setups — the gadgets, the apps, the bookstores, the bookmark brands, the highlighter colors, everything. As always, you delivered! Since a bunch of you asked, before we get into all your great gear and advice, here’s my current setup:

  • I read mostly on one of three devices: a Kindle Paperwhite, an iPad Mini, or a Boox Palma 2. The iPad is for when I need to take lots of notes and highlights, the Palma goes everywhere with me, and the Paperwhite lives next to my bed. Almost all of my ebooks are in the Kindle universe; I wish that weren’t the case, and should probably switch to something more open, but it’s a hard change to make.
  • As a result, I mostly read books in the Kindle app, but all of the rest of my digital reading happens in Readwise Reader. I frequently dabble with both Instapaper and Matter, but Reader’s search, organization tools, and ability to parse and convert PDFs into a nice reading experience are just unmatched.
  • I use Feedbin for RSS reading. On my computer, I use Feedbin’s website; on mobile I mostly use Unread.
  • When I buy physical books, which I’m trying to do a lot more now that I have a toddler who sees me looking at screens all the time, I try to buy them from Bookshop.org. Or from my local library / bookstore. My book collection is growing for the first time in forever, and it’s a delight.

But enough about me! Here are the things I heard the most about from you:

  • The library! Yay libraries! So many of us are using Libby and Hoopla and MyLibro and Sora and so many other tools to make the most of our library cards. Absolutely love to see it.
  • The Kindle and the iPad Mini are the big winners among reading devices. No big surprise there, really. But I also heard from Kobo fans (both Clara and Libra), more than one devoted iPod Touch fan, and lots of believers in the Xteink X4. Oh, and of course, the Boox Palma remains a winner.
  • The most popular reading apps were, also unsurprisingly, Kindle and Apple Books. But there are some devoted BookFusion fans out there, too, and Bookshop.org’s app appears to be catching on.
  • We love a way to track our collection, and our progress. Both The StoryGraph and Book Tracker have a lot of fans, and practically everyone either quit or is looking to quit Goodreads.
  • Lots of us like to listen to books, which of course means Audible came up a few times. But a lot of us are also making good use of the 15 hours of audio that come with Spotify Premium.
  • BookBub, a great site for finding ebook sales, came up a bunch. So did Chirp, its sister site for audiobooks.
  • Saving and syncing highlights is an ongoing project for a lot of us. Lots of Readwise users out there, syncing stuff to Notion and Craft and Obsidian, but also a lot of folks building their own apps to make this easier.
  • I heard about, conservatively, 50 different RSS readers. Unread and Reeder were the RSS favorites, and Instapaper, Readwise Reader, and Wallabag are the go-tos for saving stuff for later.

One last note: I heard from a lot of people that keeping up with newsletters is a hard and unsolved problem. Do you send everything to a reading app? An RSS feed? Try to manage it in Gmail? Who knows! As you may have guessed, I also have a lot of newsletters I don’t know how to manage. If you have tips, I’m all ears. And thanks to everyone who shared their reading setups!

Here’s what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now as well! Email installer@theverge.com or 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 to this post on Threads and this post on Bluesky.

“I’m moving from Google (Gmail) to a fantastic European alternative: Cirrux. With a sync service you can untie yourself from Big Tech, without losing your emails.” — Olaf

“The Ghost in the Shell anime on Amazon is the best looking thing on TV. It’s as lore-dense as a concrete brick, but if you can look past that, it’s absolutely worth the watch.” — B Carzo

“Gravity is the best / simplest note-taking app. Most note apps, as you take notes, they get lost as you add more, losing their relevance; with Gravity you can snap any note to the top of the page. The simplicity is brilliant.” — Andrew

“Thanks to Rohit for the 4×3 suggestion in last week’s Installer. The other game on the site, Smush, is also fantastic. Both are wonderful fresh takes on games from the New York Times.” — Kurt

“I ordered the Pebble Index 01 ring. I desperately want to dictate little notes to myself and opening an app on my phone is a lot of friction.” — Anna

“I just finished the book Seek Immediate Shelter by Vincent Yu. It follows a bunch of people in a small town as they get an emergency ‘incoming missile’ text, then the ‘false alert’ message about 20 minutes later, and how each person reacts during and after the alert. It was fantastic.” — Matt

“Recently stumbled upon Joon Lee’s YouTube channel. Fantastic deep dives on current sports/culture from an independent perspective. Spoiler – Most things have been ruined by gambling & private equity. In an age of hot takes and clickbait, he’s the breath of fresh air sports media fans need.” — Brett

“I’ve been playing around with Hypertexting, a new app that treats RSS (and your personal blog) like an open social network. It’s really interesting and has a lot of potential.” — Chris

“This week I’ve been reading The Interface Series, which was a sci-fi/horror web serial from about 10 years ago. Each chapter is posted as a comment in a random, unrelated Reddit thread, but it’s all been collated at /r/9M9H9E9. Fascinating speculative fiction that makes the most of its medium.” — Andie

I’ve always appreciated the size and power of an IMAX screen, but until I heard Matt Damon recently explain how strange it is to act into an IMAX camera, I don’t think I really understood how remarkable and complicated the technology really is. So of course I loved this Tested video on how IMAX is projected, this Christopher Nolan interview on how he thinks about formats, this dive into the dying art of 70mm, and this excellent explainer on the overall technology. Fine, Chris, I’ll drive halfway across the state to see this movie properly. You win.

Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.
#apps #gadgets #tools #readerAI,Gadgets,Installer,Streaming,Tech"> The vertical video takeover is hereThis is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on all things vertical video, follow David Pierce. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.For a while, every social and media platform had its own identity. YouTube was for clips of TV shows and movies, and the home of so many members of a burgeoning creator community. Instagram was mostly pictures. Netflix was trying to be the on-demand HBO. Facebook was about friends. Twitter was about news. Snapchat was a messaging app.All these apps did have one important thing in common, though: They were growing up alongside the smartphone. Billions of new people were coming online for the first time, and they began to make content that made sense for the tall, skinny new devices in their hands. Selfies were a vertical art form, both because the photos filled the screen better and because it was just easier to hold the phone and take the photo that way. Some resisted the idea of vertical video for years — they’d argue that our eyes are meant to scan horizontally rather than vertically, and that vertical video looked bad on widescreen laptops. But ultimately phones won, and we hold our phones upright, so our phone experiences turned upright. That includes entertainment.As has been true so many times, Snap figured this out before anyone. It launched Stories in late 2013 as a slightly more relaxed way to see what your friends are up to. CEO Evan Spiegel called it a “totally new way to share your day with friends — or everyone.” It took off in a massive way, and by the middle of 2014 was the most popular feature on Snapchat. That’s the kind of virality that Mark Zuckerberg tends to notice, and by August of 2016, the feature had been copied more or less exactly into Instagram. Kevin Systrom, then the CEO of Instagram, said of Spiegel and Snapchat that “they deserve all the credit” for Stories. The implication? That this was no longer a proprietary feature of a single social network; it was just in the air. Stories were for everyone. They started showing up on LinkedIn, Tinder, Medium, and so many other places.Stories weren’t always video, but as cameras and upload speeds improved, video became the dominant medium in many ephemeral spaces. And video stories had two semi-magical properties: They were perfectly suited to endless, mindless scrolling, and they made it really easy to integrate ads. Only a few months after turning on Stories in Instagram, by which point half the platform’s users were already using Stories, Facebook began flooding ads into the product. The semi-randomness of Stories made ads actually seem less intrusive — you’d see a photo of a dog, a video of a hike, an ad for jeans, your friend’s makeup routine, brunch pics, an ad for blush. Video ads felt more premium, took up the whole screen, and were thus far more lucrative for the social platforms.With apologies to the short, brilliant life of Vine, the six-second video platform that helped invent so much about the video-first social network, it wasn’t until TikTok took off that things really turned again. The platform launched in the US in 2018, but had been popular for a few years in China as Douyin and elsewhere as Musical.ly. TikTok combined the vertical-first format of Stories with the permanence of YouTube, but it also made video easier than ever. It had filters like Instagram and Snapchat, but also supplied a steady stream of video ideas through the platform’s many trends, offered access to music and sound effects, and made it easy to stitch or duet a video.By defaulting to the purely algorithmic For You page, TikTok also freed creators from caring about curating their profile or worrying about posting too much — you could just pump out videos and trust the algorithm to deliver them. And so that’s what people did. Pretty quickly, TikTok became one of the fastest growing apps on the planet, and its daily usage numbers became the envy of the industry. Instagram may have had more users, but TikTok users spent far more time TikToking.When TikTok became a phenomenon, just about everyone jumped on the vertical video bandwagon. Reels launched in 2020 and became a core feature of both Instagram and Facebook; YouTube created Shorts a year later. By the end of 2021, Twitter had both launched and killed a similar feature called Fleets. By this point, this kind of full-screen, vertical-scrolling video was part of the lingua franca of the smartphone. At the same time, in a search for ever more engagement, these platforms were learning another lesson from TikTok: to stop relying on your friends to post interesting content, and instead to show you whatever the algorithm thinks you might like. Social networks were gone, replaced by social media — entertainment with a comments section.Short-form, vertical video has effectively won the internet. Business is booming, and viewers show no sign of tuning out. Meta said in 2024 that Instagram users were spending more than half their time in Reels, and said in 2025 the feature was turning into a billion annual business across Meta’s apps. About 63 percent of young adults and teens are on TikTok, per Pew Research Center, and one in five teens reported being on the app “almost constantly.” YouTube reported 200 billion daily views of Shorts at the end of 2025, and said that Shorts earned more money per watch hour than standard YouTube videos.The last three or four years have been about relentless standardization in social media. The pace with which these products copy each other, and regress back toward parity, has been absolutely astonishing. First, Shorts and Reels both aped TikTok’s design, its duetting and stitching, and its close relationship with sounds and music. Then they bought into TikTok’s idea of prioritizing content over connection — followers are dead, long live the algorithm. TikTok pushed hard into shopping, then suddenly Reels and Shorts became a lot more shoppable. YouTube began to grow on TVs, and suddenly TikTok and Instagram started investing in its own TV apps. Videos got longer and longer across platforms, to allow more ads. All the apps got really into livestreaming for a while. And micro dramas. They’ve relentlessly copied each other on big things like letting users control their algorithm, and small things like Clear Mode.As the social platforms spin endlessly around each other, they’ve gotten some surprising company. Company after company started to notice their content floating around social media platforms, often in dubiously legal ways, and tried to take some of the watch time for themselves. Spotify decided it, too, wanted to be a video service, and built a vertical-scrolling feed for users to explore. Disney built a TikTok clone for ESPN and another for Disney Plus, both called Verts. Netflix, Prime Video, and Paramount Plus all called their clones Clips.There are two reasons for the ongoing onslaught of short-form vertical video: time spent and advertising. The endlessly scrolling video feed turns out to be one of the most engrossing forms of entertainment ever devised (to the point that it has become a regulatory problem for the social platforms), and in a relentless competition for eyeballs and attention, it has become everyone’s best idea. In 2024, when Meta switched its default video player to a vertical-first layout across all platforms, the race was officially won.Meanwhile, as those platforms have captured more of our time and attention, short-form video has become a dominant force of advertising on the internet, which means advertisers are already comfortable making ads designed to go between videos in the feed. And as so many companies turn to AI to do their ad targeting, all they really need is the creative to get started. “So long as clients give us different assets — a six-second ad, a 15-second ad, a long-format, a vertical ad — AI is essentially powering everything else,” YouTube’s Brian Albert told me last year. “From the audiences you’re reaching, to the contextual placements, to the ad that’s actually showing.” The combination of AI and vertical video has become a self-fulfilling prophecy: The more it wins, the easier it becomes for everyone else to get on board, and so it just keeps winning.Vertical video haters, I have bad news: It’s only going to get worse. TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram are if anything going to become more short-form and vertical, since those short videos are easier to make and easier to load into endlessly scrolling feeds. Video services used to require you to pick something and press play, but now all they need is for you to open the app and they can start showing you ads. They’re not going to want to go back. Here’s how dominant video is: Facebook is testing a new version of the app that loads a full-screen video feed when you open the app. If that happens, there will be no Facebook — only Reels. After all this time, they’ve trained users to want and expect this kind of fast-paced, instant-gratification entertainment, to the point where even a full-length movie can feel like a chore.Meanwhile, after years of raising prices, streaming services around the world are hoping they can turn to advertising to keep growing. For a while, they could coast on the back of linear TV, borrowing those ads to run on digital platforms. But a TikTok ad won’t make any sense on Netflix, so Netflix decided the best thing to do is build something that looks more like TikTok. A recent HubSpot report found that short-form video was by a wide margin both the most-used and most successful form of marketing content in 2025, and that it was the format in which marketers planned to invest the most this year.All that said, there are glimmers of a bigger shift beginning to happen. Fed up with the algorithm, some users are starting to demand the return of friends and family in social media. But more broadly, more and more young people are deciding to put down their phones, resist the invasion of AI into their lives, and look for different kinds of entertainment. Movie theaters are having a big year; one of the year’s most exciting new phones is a flip phone. As long as we live in this era of social media and entertainment, vertical video is going to win. It would take a cultural revolution to stop it — and there might just be one brewing.The best way to understand TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat in particular right now is as a combination of two things: a streaming service and an inbox. Studies have found that the most popular thing to do is watch videos, and the second most popular thing is to send videos to someone else. Actually posting? Way down the list. (YouTube, by the way, is desperately trying to make DMs happen.)If you’ve made it this far and you’re thinking, no way, you’re way overstating it? I’m so sorry to say this, but you might just be old. At this point, YouTube and Facebook cross generations and demographics, but Pew and others have found that TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram are effectively ubiquitous among young people in particular.It’s important to remember that views are lies. Everyone on the internet has an incentive to make their platform seem big and vibrant and popular, and they will invent whatever new metrics they need to do so.New York published a great piece earlier this year about the shifting vibes on YouTube, and the ways in which the creator economy is being unmoored in part by the shift to vertical video. Yeah, the platforms have figured out how to make money from your video feed, but it’s not as simple for creators. All the way back in 2015, The New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo made a good case for vertical video. It’s a fun reminder of just how contentious the idea was!You should read my colleague Mia Sato’s story on the clip economy, which turns shows, movies, podcasts, and more into bite-size pieces for social platforms. It’s a weird industry, but it works — and you can see why the streamers want to compete.Here’s a really good breakdown of all the things TikTok got right, from its algorithm to its whole approach to content. Every bit of it has been copied relentlessly ever since.Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.David PierceCloseDavid PiercePosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by David PierceColumnCloseColumnPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All ColumnCreatorsCloseCreatorsPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All CreatorsFacebookCloseFacebookPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All FacebookInstagramCloseInstagramPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All InstagramMetaCloseMetaPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All MetaSocial MediaCloseSocial MediaPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All Social MediaStreamingCloseStreamingPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All StreamingTechCloseTechPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All TechThe StepbackCloseThe StepbackPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All The StepbackTikTokCloseTikTokPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All TikTokYouTubeCloseYouTubePosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All YouTube#vertical #video #takeoverColumn,Creators,Facebook,Instagram,Meta,Social Media,Streaming,Tech,The Stepback,TikTok,YouTube
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Installer homepage.)

This week, I’ve been recording the next season of Version History (this season’s finale is out on Sunday!), reading about data center heists and Backyard Baseball and the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, canceling my October plans to see Digger 30 or 40 times, taking on the new Knockout Tour routes in Mario Kart World, learning more than I ever intended about Staten Island thanks to Revisionist History, reading up on the history of the very first chatbot, and setting up my Flipper Busy Bar. I love the thing, and have no idea what to use it for.

I also have for you the movie of the summer, a great update to a great note-taking app, a new app for organizing your photos, and much more. Let’s go.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you reading / watching / playing / listening to / soldering together this week? 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 Odyssey. I’ll be honest: I expected this movie to not be great. Hot director bites off too big a story, not even Christopher Nolan can hit every time, right? WRONG. The reviews are amazing, the whole thing actually feels very current, and I absolutely cannot wait to plant myself in an IMAX theater and soak in the epic-ness of this one. Several dozen times.
  • Bear 2.9. Bear’s tag-based system has always felt a little too limiting to me, but expanding the idea into Workspaces makes it way more powerful without being any more complex. So clever, so useful, still one of the best apps to write in across Apple devices.
  • The World Cup final. By just about any measure, Sunday’s game will be the biggest thing on TV… until we do this again in four years. This year’s tournament has been spectacular, and whether you like soccer or not, the final tends to be good TV. Treat it like the Super Bowl! Have a party!
  • “How Microtransactions (Almost) Ruined Gaming, with Dan Soder.” Really good episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out that makes an imperfect but very compelling argument that we have almost completely lost the plot when it comes to gaming. But the fight is not yet entirely lost.
  • Aphera. I’ve been hearing good things about this new Mac-based photo editor, which is fast and powerful and aimed directly at replacing the ever-rising price of Adobe’s tools. Ditching Lightroom is a lot to ask, but I’m excited to give this a real shot.
  • Parchment. Chris Lawley, friend of Installer, shipped his notes-and-tasks app for Apple devices this week, and it’s really well done! It goes hard on just showing you what matters right now and hiding everything else, and I kind of appreciate that.
  • The Loading Museum. What a fun idea: a repository of all the things that have made us wait on our computers. Watch a photo load like it’s 1997, remember what it felt like to wait for the internet to connect, and learn what designers have always known about how to make slow things feel faster.
  • The Codex Micro. I love a shortcut button, and while I think $230 is an absurd price to pay for a bunch of buttons you could re-create with a Stream Deck or any number of other things, I do think these agent-controlling keys are pretty delightful. Work Louder stuff just tends to feel good.

(Tiny housekeeping note: From now on, when we do a special section like this, it’ll be in place of Screen Share for that week. I’ve heard from a bunch of folks that some issues are actually too much, and this feels like a good trade that also makes my life easier. Win-win!)

They say reading is dead. They are, in fact, incorrect. A couple of weeks ago, I asked you all to share your reading setups — the gadgets, the apps, the bookstores, the bookmark brands, the highlighter colors, everything. As always, you delivered! Since a bunch of you asked, before we get into all your great gear and advice, here’s my current setup:

  • I read mostly on one of three devices: a Kindle Paperwhite, an iPad Mini, or a Boox Palma 2. The iPad is for when I need to take lots of notes and highlights, the Palma goes everywhere with me, and the Paperwhite lives next to my bed. Almost all of my ebooks are in the Kindle universe; I wish that weren’t the case, and should probably switch to something more open, but it’s a hard change to make.
  • As a result, I mostly read books in the Kindle app, but all of the rest of my digital reading happens in Readwise Reader. I frequently dabble with both Instapaper and Matter, but Reader’s search, organization tools, and ability to parse and convert PDFs into a nice reading experience are just unmatched.
  • I use Feedbin for RSS reading. On my computer, I use Feedbin’s website; on mobile I mostly use Unread.
  • When I buy physical books, which I’m trying to do a lot more now that I have a toddler who sees me looking at screens all the time, I try to buy them from Bookshop.org. Or from my local library / bookstore. My book collection is growing for the first time in forever, and it’s a delight.

But enough about me! Here are the things I heard the most about from you:

  • The library! Yay libraries! So many of us are using Libby and Hoopla and MyLibro and Sora and so many other tools to make the most of our library cards. Absolutely love to see it.
  • The Kindle and the iPad Mini are the big winners among reading devices. No big surprise there, really. But I also heard from Kobo fans (both Clara and Libra), more than one devoted iPod Touch fan, and lots of believers in the Xteink X4. Oh, and of course, the Boox Palma remains a winner.
  • The most popular reading apps were, also unsurprisingly, Kindle and Apple Books. But there are some devoted BookFusion fans out there, too, and Bookshop.org’s app appears to be catching on.
  • We love a way to track our collection, and our progress. Both The StoryGraph and Book Tracker have a lot of fans, and practically everyone either quit or is looking to quit Goodreads.
  • Lots of us like to listen to books, which of course means Audible came up a few times. But a lot of us are also making good use of the 15 hours of audio that come with Spotify Premium.
  • BookBub, a great site for finding ebook sales, came up a bunch. So did Chirp, its sister site for audiobooks.
  • Saving and syncing highlights is an ongoing project for a lot of us. Lots of Readwise users out there, syncing stuff to Notion and Craft and Obsidian, but also a lot of folks building their own apps to make this easier.
  • I heard about, conservatively, 50 different RSS readers. Unread and Reeder were the RSS favorites, and Instapaper, Readwise Reader, and Wallabag are the go-tos for saving stuff for later.

One last note: I heard from a lot of people that keeping up with newsletters is a hard and unsolved problem. Do you send everything to a reading app? An RSS feed? Try to manage it in Gmail? Who knows! As you may have guessed, I also have a lot of newsletters I don’t know how to manage. If you have tips, I’m all ears. And thanks to everyone who shared their reading setups!

Here’s what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now as well! Email installer@theverge.com or 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 to this post on Threads and this post on Bluesky.

“I’m moving from Google (Gmail) to a fantastic European alternative: Cirrux. With a sync service you can untie yourself from Big Tech, without losing your emails.” — Olaf

“The Ghost in the Shell anime on Amazon is the best looking thing on TV. It’s as lore-dense as a concrete brick, but if you can look past that, it’s absolutely worth the watch.” — B Carzo

“Gravity is the best / simplest note-taking app. Most note apps, as you take notes, they get lost as you add more, losing their relevance; with Gravity you can snap any note to the top of the page. The simplicity is brilliant.” — Andrew

“Thanks to Rohit for the 4×3 suggestion in last week’s Installer. The other game on the site, Smush, is also fantastic. Both are wonderful fresh takes on games from the New York Times.” — Kurt

“I ordered the Pebble Index 01 ring. I desperately want to dictate little notes to myself and opening an app on my phone is a lot of friction.” — Anna

“I just finished the book Seek Immediate Shelter by Vincent Yu. It follows a bunch of people in a small town as they get an emergency ‘incoming missile’ text, then the ‘false alert’ message about 20 minutes later, and how each person reacts during and after the alert. It was fantastic.” — Matt

“Recently stumbled upon Joon Lee’s YouTube channel. Fantastic deep dives on current sports/culture from an independent perspective. Spoiler – Most things have been ruined by gambling & private equity. In an age of hot takes and clickbait, he’s the breath of fresh air sports media fans need.” — Brett

“I’ve been playing around with Hypertexting, a new app that treats RSS (and your personal blog) like an open social network. It’s really interesting and has a lot of potential.” — Chris

“This week I’ve been reading The Interface Series, which was a sci-fi/horror web serial from about 10 years ago. Each chapter is posted as a comment in a random, unrelated Reddit thread, but it’s all been collated at /r/9M9H9E9. Fascinating speculative fiction that makes the most of its medium.” — Andie

I’ve always appreciated the size and power of an IMAX screen, but until I heard Matt Damon recently explain how strange it is to act into an IMAX camera, I don’t think I really understood how remarkable and complicated the technology really is. So of course I loved this Tested video on how IMAX is projected, this Christopher Nolan interview on how he thinks about formats, this dive into the dying art of 70mm, and this excellent explainer on the overall technology. Fine, Chris, I’ll drive halfway across the state to see this movie properly. You win.

Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.

#apps #gadgets #tools #readerAI,Gadgets,Installer,Streaming,Tech">The apps, gadgets, and tools every reader needs

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 136, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, hope your neighborhood isn’t as smoky as mine, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

This week, I’ve been recording the next season of Version History (this season’s finale is out on Sunday!), reading about data center heists and Backyard Baseball and the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, canceling my October plans to see Digger 30 or 40 times, taking on the new Knockout Tour routes in Mario Kart World, learning more than I ever intended about Staten Island thanks to Revisionist History, reading up on the history of the very first chatbot, and setting up my Flipper Busy Bar. I love the thing, and have no idea what to use it for.

I also have for you the movie of the summer, a great update to a great note-taking app, a new app for organizing your photos, and much more. Let’s go.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you reading / watching / playing / listening to / soldering together this week? 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 Odyssey. I’ll be honest: I expected this movie to not be great. Hot director bites off too big a story, not even Christopher Nolan can hit every time, right? WRONG. The reviews are amazing, the whole thing actually feels very current, and I absolutely cannot wait to plant myself in an IMAX theater and soak in the epic-ness of this one. Several dozen times.
  • Bear 2.9. Bear’s tag-based system has always felt a little too limiting to me, but expanding the idea into Workspaces makes it way more powerful without being any more complex. So clever, so useful, still one of the best apps to write in across Apple devices.
  • The World Cup final. By just about any measure, Sunday’s game will be the biggest thing on TV… until we do this again in four years. This year’s tournament has been spectacular, and whether you like soccer or not, the final tends to be good TV. Treat it like the Super Bowl! Have a party!
  • “How Microtransactions (Almost) Ruined Gaming, with Dan Soder.” Really good episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out that makes an imperfect but very compelling argument that we have almost completely lost the plot when it comes to gaming. But the fight is not yet entirely lost.
  • Aphera. I’ve been hearing good things about this new Mac-based photo editor, which is fast and powerful and aimed directly at replacing the ever-rising price of Adobe’s tools. Ditching Lightroom is a lot to ask, but I’m excited to give this a real shot.
  • Parchment. Chris Lawley, friend of Installer, shipped his notes-and-tasks app for Apple devices this week, and it’s really well done! It goes hard on just showing you what matters right now and hiding everything else, and I kind of appreciate that.
  • The Loading Museum. What a fun idea: a repository of all the things that have made us wait on our computers. Watch a photo load like it’s 1997, remember what it felt like to wait for the internet to connect, and learn what designers have always known about how to make slow things feel faster.
  • The Codex Micro. I love a shortcut button, and while I think $230 is an absurd price to pay for a bunch of buttons you could re-create with a Stream Deck or any number of other things, I do think these agent-controlling keys are pretty delightful. Work Louder stuff just tends to feel good.

(Tiny housekeeping note: From now on, when we do a special section like this, it’ll be in place of Screen Share for that week. I’ve heard from a bunch of folks that some issues are actually too much, and this feels like a good trade that also makes my life easier. Win-win!)

They say reading is dead. They are, in fact, incorrect. A couple of weeks ago, I asked you all to share your reading setups — the gadgets, the apps, the bookstores, the bookmark brands, the highlighter colors, everything. As always, you delivered! Since a bunch of you asked, before we get into all your great gear and advice, here’s my current setup:

  • I read mostly on one of three devices: a Kindle Paperwhite, an iPad Mini, or a Boox Palma 2. The iPad is for when I need to take lots of notes and highlights, the Palma goes everywhere with me, and the Paperwhite lives next to my bed. Almost all of my ebooks are in the Kindle universe; I wish that weren’t the case, and should probably switch to something more open, but it’s a hard change to make.
  • As a result, I mostly read books in the Kindle app, but all of the rest of my digital reading happens in Readwise Reader. I frequently dabble with both Instapaper and Matter, but Reader’s search, organization tools, and ability to parse and convert PDFs into a nice reading experience are just unmatched.
  • I use Feedbin for RSS reading. On my computer, I use Feedbin’s website; on mobile I mostly use Unread.
  • When I buy physical books, which I’m trying to do a lot more now that I have a toddler who sees me looking at screens all the time, I try to buy them from Bookshop.org. Or from my local library / bookstore. My book collection is growing for the first time in forever, and it’s a delight.

But enough about me! Here are the things I heard the most about from you:

  • The library! Yay libraries! So many of us are using Libby and Hoopla and MyLibro and Sora and so many other tools to make the most of our library cards. Absolutely love to see it.
  • The Kindle and the iPad Mini are the big winners among reading devices. No big surprise there, really. But I also heard from Kobo fans (both Clara and Libra), more than one devoted iPod Touch fan, and lots of believers in the Xteink X4. Oh, and of course, the Boox Palma remains a winner.
  • The most popular reading apps were, also unsurprisingly, Kindle and Apple Books. But there are some devoted BookFusion fans out there, too, and Bookshop.org’s app appears to be catching on.
  • We love a way to track our collection, and our progress. Both The StoryGraph and Book Tracker have a lot of fans, and practically everyone either quit or is looking to quit Goodreads.
  • Lots of us like to listen to books, which of course means Audible came up a few times. But a lot of us are also making good use of the 15 hours of audio that come with Spotify Premium.
  • BookBub, a great site for finding ebook sales, came up a bunch. So did Chirp, its sister site for audiobooks.
  • Saving and syncing highlights is an ongoing project for a lot of us. Lots of Readwise users out there, syncing stuff to Notion and Craft and Obsidian, but also a lot of folks building their own apps to make this easier.
  • I heard about, conservatively, 50 different RSS readers. Unread and Reeder were the RSS favorites, and Instapaper, Readwise Reader, and Wallabag are the go-tos for saving stuff for later.

One last note: I heard from a lot of people that keeping up with newsletters is a hard and unsolved problem. Do you send everything to a reading app? An RSS feed? Try to manage it in Gmail? Who knows! As you may have guessed, I also have a lot of newsletters I don’t know how to manage. If you have tips, I’m all ears. And thanks to everyone who shared their reading setups!

Here’s what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now as well! Email installer@theverge.com or 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 to this post on Threads and this post on Bluesky.

“I’m moving from Google (Gmail) to a fantastic European alternative: Cirrux. With a sync service you can untie yourself from Big Tech, without losing your emails.” — Olaf

“The Ghost in the Shell anime on Amazon is the best looking thing on TV. It’s as lore-dense as a concrete brick, but if you can look past that, it’s absolutely worth the watch.” — B Carzo

“Gravity is the best / simplest note-taking app. Most note apps, as you take notes, they get lost as you add more, losing their relevance; with Gravity you can snap any note to the top of the page. The simplicity is brilliant.” — Andrew

“Thanks to Rohit for the 4×3 suggestion in last week’s Installer. The other game on the site, Smush, is also fantastic. Both are wonderful fresh takes on games from the New York Times.” — Kurt

“I ordered the Pebble Index 01 ring. I desperately want to dictate little notes to myself and opening an app on my phone is a lot of friction.” — Anna

“I just finished the book Seek Immediate Shelter by Vincent Yu. It follows a bunch of people in a small town as they get an emergency ‘incoming missile’ text, then the ‘false alert’ message about 20 minutes later, and how each person reacts during and after the alert. It was fantastic.” — Matt

“Recently stumbled upon Joon Lee’s YouTube channel. Fantastic deep dives on current sports/culture from an independent perspective. Spoiler – Most things have been ruined by gambling & private equity. In an age of hot takes and clickbait, he’s the breath of fresh air sports media fans need.” — Brett

“I’ve been playing around with Hypertexting, a new app that treats RSS (and your personal blog) like an open social network. It’s really interesting and has a lot of potential.” — Chris

“This week I’ve been reading The Interface Series, which was a sci-fi/horror web serial from about 10 years ago. Each chapter is posted as a comment in a random, unrelated Reddit thread, but it’s all been collated at /r/9M9H9E9. Fascinating speculative fiction that makes the most of its medium.” — Andie

I’ve always appreciated the size and power of an IMAX screen, but until I heard Matt Damon recently explain how strange it is to act into an IMAX camera, I don’t think I really understood how remarkable and complicated the technology really is. So of course I loved this Tested video on how IMAX is projected, this Christopher Nolan interview on how he thinks about formats, this dive into the dying art of 70mm, and this excellent explainer on the overall technology. Fine, Chris, I’ll drive halfway across the state to see this movie properly. You win.

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Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 136, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff…