Hotline: E Ink, the fediverse, and smart Puka shells

0:02David Pierce:Hello and welcome to The Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of anti-reflective display coatings. I'm your friend David Pierce, and today on the show, we're taking your questions about I actually don't know what. Travis Larchuk, our producer, is going to come on and he's going to ask me some of the questions we've been getting on The Verge Cast hotline. We're going to get into all of them. He has promised me I'm going to love at least one of them. I'm very excited about it. All that's coming in just a sec, but first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today. This is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Wednesday, August 5th, 2026.

0:30David Pierce:Disney is thinking about some pretty big changes to its streaming strategy. On its earnings call, Josh DiAmaro, the new CEO, said that the Disney Plus app will soon get games, merchandise, and other experiences, whatever that means. Basically, it seems like Disney Plus is going to become the Disney Everything app. Disney's even partnering with TikTok to turn the vertical video feed into, I guess, Disney Talk, whatever that looks like. DiAmaro also said that Disney is looking into adding a free ad support tier to Disney Plus and set it in such a way that it's very clear that that is in fact coming and probably very soon.

1:02David Pierce:Right now, the streaming wars in general are just a race to become YouTube before YouTube can swallow the entertainment industry whole. It's wild out there. SpaceX also just reported earnings for the first time ever, and it's doing, I don't know, fine. SpaceX wants you to think that it's a space and AI company, but right now it's mostly making money renting compute to other AI companies. But the big news was Gwynne Shotwell, the company's president and actual leader, saying SpaceX is planning to build a terrestrial mobile network in addition to its satellite systems. In part, the plan seems to be to connect all of its existing Starlink antennas and build a network that way.

1:37David Pierce:Starlink evidently has its sights set on taking, quote, quite a few customers from T-Mobile, ATT, and Verizon. We'll see. And finally, a preemptive RIP to Google Assistant, which is officially being removed from Android devices starting on September 4th. This isn't at all surprising. Google has been all in on Gemini for a while now. But I think Assistant is actually still the best way to do some simple phone tasks. And now it is all LLMs, all the time, apparently forever. You can read more about all this at TheVerge.com. That is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Wednesday, August 5th. Support for this show comes from Odoo.

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2:50This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18+.

3:19David Pierce:all right let's get to some of your questions as a reminder the best way to ask us questions about anything and everything we love all of your weirdest possible questions you can email vergecast at the verge.com you can call the hotline 866 verge 11 we're going to do more and more of these all the time travis slarshuck our producer who is here just wants to do the hotline all the time all the time every show i love this uh you have a bunch of questions I am going to do my best to answer them. Let's get into it. All right. Our audience is very interested in that sick light phone that you talked about.

3:51Everyone is interested in this. It is extremely sick. Our first voicemail is from Wiley, and he has some thoughts on how phones like this could be successful in the long run. Hey, David. This is Wiley. I just listened to the podcast with the light phone, Flip, and I've had a light phone and Nokia's and every other flip phone that's basically new. And you asked, what is the thing that needs to happen in order for these things to work, basically? And in my opinion, the thing that needs to happen is open development and leverage the power of the very passionate community that is willing to do development for them and approved and don't approve based on purely philosophical lines.

4:44I think, in my opinion, that would be the game changer that allows these things to take off.

4:52David Pierce:Okay, Wiley, I say this with love. I can hear from your voicemail that you are reckoning with the exact same thing that everyone does in this space, which is who decides? This is the problem with all of this, right? Like, you can make a phone that does a certain number of things. And if you, the developer, limit that phone to a certain number of things, that is at least a very clear principle, right? You say, here is the phone. It does the things that it does. It does not do other things. The end. You can either like it or you cannot. The minute you open it up to any more than that, everything gets weird and messy and complicated because you say either I, David Pierce, the CEO of Flipphone Incorporated, am now the single arbiter of what belongs on this device that you've actually already paid a bunch of money for and in theory could make a very compelling case that is yours to do with as you please.

5:43David Pierce:like Travis do you remember that thing going around with the Light Phone 3 where a bunch of people started putting full Android on it like the Light Phone 3 is running on Android so people were just hacking it to run actual honest to God Android it seems like it defeats the purpose a little bit but okay a lot of people would agree with you so this this became a whole thing because there were a bunch of people who were like you were you were destroying the thing that this is supposed to be why on earth would you buy this phone to run all of this stuff and then there a bunch of people who are just like, screw you.

6:13David Pierce:I paid$700 for this phone. It is mine to do with as I please. Both of those things are good and true things. And I've been talking to a bunch of people about this. And the two different courses of action that I've really found are Commodore, which is making a flip phone. They sort of bought and rebooted the brand. There's really fascinating Commodore thing happening with like retro tech. They're making a flip phone. and their idea is actually almost exactly what Wiley said, is that anybody's going to be able to make apps, but they're only going to be able to be listed on the app store if they are approved by Commodore.

6:48David Pierce:And that sets up the CEO of Commodore, this guy Christian, as like the Lord and Savior of flip phones. He is the arbiter of truth and whether that gets to be good. And I think to some extent that is a perfectly good and valid opinion, right? He's like, we're selling this phone, we're selling a belief system and value system with this phone, and I will be the one in control of that value system. Lightphone has gone very much the other way. They opened up the development kit. They're going to have some curation and things in their own store as you like go to the website to download stuff to do on your phone.

7:23David Pierce:If somebody wants to make a Facebook app, Light is not going to promote the Facebook app. But if you want to make a Facebook app and run it on your Lightflip, Kai Tang would tell you that that is your right And it is your phone. And if you want to completely destroy the whole value system and belief system behind this phone in the name of getting Facebook and Instagram on your phone, knock yourself out. So I think in line with the thing that all these flip phones have been dealing with for forever, which is what can these do before they become a problem? Like everybody agrees you shouldn't be able to have Instagram on a minimalist phone.

7:57David Pierce:That is simple. Should you be able to have WhatsApp? Should you be able to have Snapchat, which is both a social media platform and like straightforwardly a text messaging replacement? Nobody knows exactly where that line is. And now the question is who gets to be the one to be the keeper of that line? And I think I probably err on the side of you should be able to do whatever you want. If you want to get a phone and then use Claude to build some weird apps that run and violate the whole premise and Light would hate you for it, But I earnestly believe that is your right as the person who just spent a bunch of money on this phone.

8:32David Pierce:But different people will land in different places on this. And I think it's going to be one of the big questions in this era going forward with these devices. All right. And then our next one. This question, I believe, is David Pierce bait. This is right up your alley. This is going straight for your heart, David. Wait, can I guess? Sure. It's going to be about one of two things. It's either going to be about which note-taking slash to-do list app this person should use, or it's going to be about e-ink screens. Hey, David, this is Eddie. I just listened to the episode with Kai from the Light Phone Slip.

9:15I was just curious, how do these minimalist phone designers, how do they decide between e-ink, LCD, OLED? E-ink screens. To me, it seems like you would want e-ink for just terrible screen and screen time restrictions, basically. But I don't know. I think this new one has an LCD. I might be wrong. But yeah, how do they make those decisions? What are the pros and cons?

9:42David Pierce:My personal brand is immaculate, Travis. Yeah, before you answer, I had this moment where you were like, I'm going to guess, where I felt like I was on the newlywed game. And I was like, oh, do I know David as well as I think I do? Yeah, turns out you and everyone else pretty much have me pegged at this point. Okay, this is a really good one. And as America's foremost expert in the books, Palma, I feel very qualified to answer this. So the trade-off here is actually relatively straightforward, which is that e-ink lasts a lot longer, it's much easier on the eyes, and it sucks. And I mean sucks as a compliment in this sense, right?

10:21David Pierce:It is actively unpleasant to do things like scroll TikTok on an e-ink screen. so even something like the books palma or all these other devices that are more full-fledged android devices they do the thing they intend to do not by making it impossible but just by making it terrible like if you want to put tiktok on your books palma you can and and as as i said before i believe that is that is your right if you knock yourself out that's weird but but go get it um but no one does and that because it doesn't work and you wouldn't like it and you would have a bad time. E-ink screens are more complicated than you'd think.

10:58David Pierce:They're all essentially run by a single company. The whole E-ink ecosystem is a strange thing that we should probably get into at some point on this show, but it's actually probably in many ways easier to get your hands on an LCD or an OLED screen than it is an E-ink screen. But that is neither here nor there. So the pros for E-ink are, I think, fairly straightforward in how you use the product, Right. The cons are that sometimes you want things that suck on an e-ink screen. And I think the one that comes up over and over with these companies is the camera. You can't use a camera properly with an e-ink screen.

11:34David Pierce:It doesn't refresh fast enough. It doesn't show enough fidelity. It won't properly show you what's in focus. Even books which ships a camera, they're like, this is a document scanner. Like, don't even try to take pictures with this thing. It will roughly capture the thing you are trying to do, and that will solve your problem relatively fine. The reason Lite started using non-e-ink screens, Lite started making e-ink phones way back in the day for all of the reasons I just described. But they realized, okay, the number one thing people require on their primary device is a camera. Like if you were to make a list of features people want on their phone, I think you'd get to camera before you'd get to phone.

12:11David Pierce:You know what I mean? Yeah. So like you just have to have a camera. And then the minute you have a camera and you want to use it for anything at all, you need a better display than what you get on an e-ink screen. You just can't do the thing on e-ink that you need to do the camera. so now you're stuck with like okay do we do a bunch of weird tricks to an oled screen to make it look more e-inky and we're starting to see this from a lot of companies like tcl is doing some really interesting stuff in this space with next paper uh there are a lot of ideas about how you can change the color of the backlight there's this really interesting company called daylight that basically just like took all the blue out of an lcd and made it feel much warmer and a little a little different and change the reflectivity.

12:55David Pierce:So there's a lot of stuff you can do on an LCD to make it more e-inky, which is where most of these companies are landing, right? Like even on the light phone, it's, it is a black and white experience until you open up the camera. And then all of a sudden it's a full color camera because a black and white camera would suck and no one wants that. So I think the trade here is, is basically e-ink solves kind of all of your problems, but one, but the one turns out to be maybe the single most important feature of most of these devices. So I think anyone who's going to use a phone or try to make something that you can use as a phone is going to ultimately land on the side of how can we minimalize an e-inkify, an LCD or an OLED rather than just go pure e-ink.

13:39David Pierce:Maybe there's some magical e-ink revolution new technology to come. Travis, you're shaking your head. And that is also how I feel. I don't know whose priority that is right now. No one's, yeah. But yeah, I think that the trade-off is tricky. And I think most of these phone makers are actually landing on the right side by landing on non-e-ink screens. Support for the show comes from Rippling. Imagine you just found out your sales team is at risk of missing quota. No need to panic. Just ask Rippling AI. Since it's built on your real-time people and business data, Rippling AI can pull metrics from Rippling and Salesforce into a meeting-ready dashboard showing quota attainment, headcount trajectory, and monthly revenue to quota by region.

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16:57All right, David, I don't know how much longer we have you before you go and leave, so I just need to run this by you before you're out. This is some more David Pierce bait. It is not about to-do lists, though. Oh, well, then I'm not interested. This is from someone named Travis, but it's not me. It's not me, I promise. We love a Travis here on this show. Question, friends. I've been very interested in your coverage of the Fediverse, or lack thereof. We're so back. But I'm wondering why it's only about social media. There's such a splintering of messaging platforms, especially in the work context.

17:29What once was established norms in email has turned to client and team conversations with important documents across email, Slack, Gchat, WhatsApp. The beauty of email is any email client can email any other. Are there efforts to federate messaging? You send it from wherever you want and I receive it however I want to receive it. Seems like a far more pressing problem. Yours in ActivityPub, Travis.

17:55David Pierce:This is my kind of thing. Okay. I just want to very briefly tell you about a company called Matrix that I find absolutely fascinating and have done a bunch of reporting on and think is sort of an underrated most important company in tech right now. I really earnestly believe this. So Matrix is exactly the Fediverse for messaging. Like imagine I have a Slack instance and you have a Slack instance and they actually have nothing to do with each other, right? They're completely separated. We each run our own on on premises. Like you can run Matrix on a network, on a Navy ship. It's like a real thing that they do.

18:33David Pierce:It is a completely distinct thing. But also I can message your Matrix from my Matrix. Like Like it turns into cross-platform messaging right next to and integrated with like team messaging that is incredibly well put together and encrypted and all the things that you would want. So Matrix started essentially as a completely federated, encrypted messaging platform. And the reason, by the way, that this is a much harder problem for messaging than it is for social media is privacy. We just have completely different expectations about the privacy of our content when we're posting it publicly to a social network and when we're talking to our friends.

19:16David Pierce:And maintaining privacy across different servers and different implementations and different companies and building a system that sort of exists in so many places but all adheres to the same very intense privacy policy is just really hard. and so this company matrix has spent a long time working through this and the most fascinating thing about matrix to me is that they have really struggled to get regular people to use it they make an app called element that is essentially just whatsapp it works very well it's very fast it's very simple but they're having a hard time getting that adoption in part because people use you know whatsapp but they are all over like secure government implementations like countries around the world are using Matrix for important, secure communication because the alternative is WhatsApp, which is not as secure, causes all kinds of problems, is not nearly as manageable and administrable.

20:12David Pierce:It's just a worse system. So what they've done is they've rolled this much more secure, controllable, ownable messaging platform called Matrix that has kind of percolated all over. So Matrix.org is specifically the answer to this question. I think it's really good technology, the people who run it are really smart and interesting and up to cool stuff. They just can't convince regular people to use it. And I think this is the most fascinating piece of this story to me is like, if it had come along before everyone got entrenched in these worst platforms like Teams and Slack, I think Matrix would be essentially ubiquitous in the world right now.

20:49David Pierce:It's the same thing with messaging, right? Like we could do better messaging, except that everybody already uses iMessage and WhatsApp. They're not good. They're just the ones that we use and getting people off of those things is very hard. But whether it's Matrix or something like it, I think it's coming. Something like this is going to make that mainstream turn and it's going to look extremely Fediverse-y because that idea is the right one. All right. We have some feedback from our episode where we talked about AI wearables. Oh, OK. Hey, what's up, y 'all? This who's Ben from Arlington, Virginia.

21:24I was listening to the episode where you ranked the different sort of AI wearables, and it got me thinking when you ranked the pendant and necklace so low, what if we brought back kind of like the puka shell chokers from the late 90s, early 2000s? Because then people could kind of design the batteries or the different components into each one of those different like balls or shelves. And then we could bring it back as a fashion statement.

21:55David Pierce:All right, love the show. Thanks, bye. Before we get into this, I would like you to just briefly close your eyes and imagine early high school David. I had a ring on my right hand. It wasn't like a thumb ring or a pinky ring. It was just a ring, just wore a ring. I'm not really sure why in retrospect. respect uh i had not one but two popped collars on my polo shirts uh not again it's very important if just one you're ridiculous two legendary uh and i did in fact have a puka shell necklace i also had braces and had a giant gap between my two front teeth and i was styling so this this is this is the david we're bringing back with this idea um first of all shout out to northern virginia Go Nova.

22:44David Pierce:This is a good idea. And Travis, I think you don't understand the extent to which this is also David Bate, because modular gadgets are my jam and have been for forever. But they don't work. That's just the problem. They don't work. We have been trying to do modular gadgets for a very long time, designing them in such a way that each one of them works individually, but also in concert with any number of other things, just turns out to be essentially impossible. We just can't do it. We can't make it work with phones without them being like hideous puzzle piece blocks that don't fit together well.

23:18David Pierce:There's so many awkward things with making that work just from a user perspective that they haven't really worked. And then you throw in the fact that there are all kinds of battery problems to solve with this. Like the idea that you could just stick a bunch of parts into a little puka and string a bunch of them together and make is such a lovely idea that I and I desperately want it to work. uh and in case you're wondering travis the singular is puka one one puka to many pukas and that's that's your necklace uh it uh it just doesn't work like i actually think everybody would like this to be the answer that you you could have a smart watch band that you would stick with a mechanical watch that you like you would have a smart pendant that could go on any number of things fitbit has been trying to do this like how do we accessorize your life with a fitbit thing for forever.