What's on my Phone 2026!

(futuristic digital music) (graphics whooshing)

- Hey, what's up? I'm MKBHG here.

And welcome to What's on my Phone, 2026,

maybe by the time you're watching this.

So last time I did this, it's been a minute,

a Samsung phone was my daily driver.

Dark Sky was one of my favorite apps.

That doesn't exist anymore. RIP.

And you know, year-to-year,

my phone setup doesn't change that much,

but over the five years it's been since I last did this,

well, there's some added change over time.

So this is my new daily setups.

Now a lot of you already know

I've been a two phone person for a long time now.

So yes, two sim cards, two lines, two phone numbers.

And as long as I've had two phones,

it's always been one Android phone and one iPhone.

And a lot of people always ask me

and maybe don't even know,

the main phone is the Android phone

and that's the phone number that people have

and that's the one I mainly use.

And then the second one is the iPhone.

And so the setup that I've been teetering on

that I almost settled on for a little bit

was gonna be OnePlus 15

and iPhone Air.

And the reason for that is I get to test obviously a lot

of phones during the course of the year,

but in between testing phones,

I will go back to a daily driver

that I can sort of rely on.

And so among all the stuff that I've tested this year,

the phones that I've gone back to the most

have been Galaxy S25 Ultra,

then Pixel 10 Pro and now this OnePlus 15.

Now if you watch my review of this phone,

you already know how much I like

most of the things about it,

and it has great battery life

and it's awesome performance and all that good stuff.

And so because the iPhone

is the secondary phone most of the time,

it could get away with not having the best battery life.

So iPhone Air, which is actually

a really nice phone aside from the battery life,

was kind of a perfect pair from it.

But unfortunately, the two phones

that I was using at the same time,

both having pretty subpar cameras,

to me was kind of the deal breaker.

So I have actually mostly been sticking

to the iPhone 17 Pro

in Orange and not the Max.

So this is the two phones, this is the OnePlus 15

and the iPhone 17 Pro.

So let's start with the OnePlus 15.

And this is my lock screen, pretty minimal.

I've got the flashlight

and Gemini shortcuts set up at the bottom.

And then the home screen is pretty stark.

I think basically my Dock has been almost unchanged

for the last decade.

But the apps that I mainly use at the bottom for me here

are TickTick, which is my tasks app,

Spotify, Google Messages,

and then the phone app.

I really don't make that many phone calls,

but for whatever reason it feels weird

not having the phone app down there,

so it's always there.

And then I have Relay for Reddit, which is a paid app.

There's not that many good Reddit apps anymore

for obvious reasons,

but I do pay the five bucks a month for this one.

The OnePlus Photos app, which is actually really good.

It syncs with Google Photos, which is huge.

That's why I don't use the Google Photos app here.

YouTube Studio app

and Notion.

Notion is the one that we use at the studio

for keeping track of everything.

But it also feels like the one

that I could most easily replace

because I mostly engage with it through notifications like,

that could be Slack or that could be Discord

or something else over there.

But most of those apps I don't launch from my home screen,

I get to with notifications.

But yeah, other than that, Google search widget

and then a bunch of blank.

So then my second page has a calendar widget up top.

I'll try to link the third party apps

that aren't like super obvious here.

So this calendar widget I've used for a long time.

And then underneath it I have the social media apps

and these tools that I use fairly often.

So you've got Waze, you've got the Chat GPT app,

the Google Home app, which is really nice

because it used to actually be kind of split

between Home and Nest,

but they finally updated everything

to work in the Home app.

And then Threads and X.

And I actually have the Arc Search here,

the Arc browser app, which I no longer use on the desktop

because they're kind of not paying attention to it anymore.

But it is still kind of useful

to have mobile sync from a couple of spaces I have set up.

So it's not my default browser,

but it lives there on my home screen to access those things.

Also, just a quick mention

because I don't know why they don't do it yet.

This is a scrollable widget

for scrolling through different days on my calendar.

Why can't you do that on the iPhone yet?

They've had widgets for a couple of years now.

None of them scroll.

Let us scroll.

Anyway, the last page, I basically just have a couple

of random apps of the moment,

things that I may be using like United Airlines

'cause I was just flying.

I use the Raindrop.io app to save links

and I use that because the Pocket app also died this year.

I used to use Pocket all the time for this

and there was a Pocket extension in Chrome

and all this stuff and now it's gone.

So I use Raindrop.io for the exact same thing.

And then Google Keep,

because that's where it automatically

adds stuff to your shopping list

when you ask Google to add to my shopping list,

it puts it in Keep for some reason.

So that's why Keep's there.

And Yahoo Fantasy,

so I can get crushed

in two different fantasy leagues at the same time.

It's going great.

Another couple of apps I find useful,

Blip is one that I found pretty recently.

It's kind of like a nice, cross-platform Airdrop

and file sharing app,

but it's actually more than just Airdrop

because it can do it wherever your devices are.

So I can Blip something to someone across the country

if they have an account.

It's super useful for file sharing, link sharing,

all that stuff.

Very quick.

And I also still use Pocket Casts

for all of my podcasts on the go.

There's a bunch of different podcasts apps,

but that's the one I've stuck with.

Spotify, for me, is really still strictly music.

I don't like having them all in one place, weirdly.

So yeah, Pocket Casts is my go-to.

And then shout out to OxygenOS

for being pretty cleanly, nicely set up

that I don't feel like I have to change that many settings.

I've got the lock screen the way I want it.

I've got my home screen laid out the way I want it.

It's not like the Samsung phone days

where I was changing a whole bunch of default settings

to get it to work the way I thought it should.

So it's good stuff.

By the way, huge shout out to our brand new merch refresh

that's finally launched.

It's really soft and comfortable

but also really high quality stuff.

The reviews are in,

so clearly people are enjoying it.

I'll leave a link below if you wanna check it out

at the brand new mkbhd.com.

But now on to my very orange iPhone 17 Pro.

Do I regret getting orange?

Uh, yeah, a little bit. Yeah.

I wish there was a black one.

The thing about like these orange bezels

showing around the front, it bothered me a little bit,

but I've set up a kind of an orange wallpaper

to try to just own the Creamsicle thing.

So anyway, this is my iPhone 17 Pro.

I have also got Gemini on the lock screen

because Siri is bad and I never wanna use it.

And then for those wondering,

I do have my Liquid Glass still on.

I haven't toggled it off.

I think it looks okay,

but I also kind of just wanna know

what people's default experiences on the iPhone are.

So I haven't changed that. I still have Liquid Glass on.

And then my Action button for those wondering

is to start a new task in my task app of choice, TickTick.

So I basically live in the TickTick app.

It's how I remember to do anything in life,

and having the ability to just hold the Action button

and then just start typing my task and save it

and it throws it in my inbox, super useful.

I just, I love that Action button feature.

And then on my home screen,

I kind of just have all of the apps I use,

mostly just here, all reachable.

It's kind of set up in a way that

if I hold it in my right hand, everything's reachable.

So you've got the photos, you've got Spotify,

YouTube and YouTube Studio.

And then Waze.

Bottom right corner here is a habit tracker, TickTick.

Copilot is a finance tracker app

and then Superhuman for email.

CARROT, over on the left is my new weather app of choice.

So you guys might know

Dark Sky was one of the best weather apps of all time maybe.

And essentially what CARROT did

was clone the Dark Sky layout that made it so good,

but then also gave us a whole bunch of customization

with other stuff, like weather sources.

And it's added a bunch of stuff on top.

There's a snarky little assistant

that describes the weather in English.

So it's a pretty good app.

I use CARROT Weather most of the time.

And then in the Dock, of course, I've got the phone app.

Again, I don't know why.

It feels weird to not have it there.

But I also hardly ever call anyone.

The Tesla app, Arc browser app again

just to have the cross platform thing,

but I would change it in a heartbeat.

And Messages.

By the way, the Tesla app, if you're wondering,

is not for any Tesla vehicle that I own.

It's just for the solar and battery setup at my house.

So anytime I open it, I can check

to see what's going on in there.

But that actually brings us to the second page,

which is just three widgets.

It's Porsche's widget at the top,

it's Rivian's widget in the middle

and it's Tesla's widget at the bottom.

All of those are like real-time updated

with whatever the current numbers

or status things are for those three setups.

And then the next home screen is a larger,

not boring weather widget.

Really, really pretty app.

I don't necessarily love the information density

or the accuracy of the information,

but it's so pretty

that I like just getting a bird's eye view

of like a glanceable version of the weather for the week.

So, really love the widgets.

And then underneath this,

this is actually a serious smart stack.

So this grid of eight icons changes

based on what it thinks I wanna open,

and it's learned me very well, I will say.

So the apps that show up here

are usually what I'm aiming for.

And then that last home screen on the right,

this is just the apps of the moment again,

which is actually some really interesting apps.

So this one here is called Neuecast.

I use Pocket Casts most of the time,

but Neuecast is one that I found

that might replace Pocket Casts for me.

It's a really clean layout

and just shows me my most recently updated podcasts

from all the ones I'm subscribed to.

And then another one here is called Athlytic.

Athlytic's really good.

I know a lot of people who use Whoops.

Whoop is the strap you wear to sort of measure your fitness

and it's got a subscription associated with it

and gives you a lot of valuable information,

which is super useful.

But I wear an Apple Watch

and I don't wanna also wear another thing

to measure that fitness information.

So what Athlytic does

is takes the information from the Apple Watch

and from Apple Health, aggregates it all

and gives me a lot of that same information

that the Whoop would.

So yeah, it's a subscription, but this gives me my recovery

and exertion for the day and stress levels

and calories burned and all that, body battery.

I like Athlytic.

I recently found that this year too,

so that's another one of my apps of the moment.

Anyway, then there are a couple more apps

that I have on my iPhone that are specifically either

because they are iPhone apps

or because they are on a phone

that I will have more long-term.

Just, as someone who reviews a lot of phones,

if I switch out my phone over and over and over again

and I keep like my phone car key on it,

it kinda gets annoying to change that so often.

So I usually do long-term stuff like that on the iPhone,

but there's also a couple of others.

So my authenticator app is Authy, that's a great iPhone app.

And there's another app called Flighty,

which is, as someone who's flown quite a bit lately,

one of the most useful apps of all time.

It basically just pulls the data directly from the source

and often notifies me before the airline app would.

And then it also aggregates a bunch of really cool stats,

like how many hours I've lost from delays this year.

And then of course I also have Blip on the iPhone as well.

Every device that I have Blip installed on

can send or receive Blips to each other.

It's super useful.

Anyway, that's basically my app setup.

I will say shout out to a studio video

where a bunch of people in the studio have also

given a lot of their favorite apps.

So I'll link that below.

Maybe you'll find some other useful stuff there.

But as far as the stuff that I use on the regular,

on the somewhat daily,

it's my OnePlus 15,

it's my iPhone 17 Pro and everything in between.

So that of course covers the software I have on my phones.

But what you probably didn't notice is I also have...

(futuristic digital music) (screen protector peeling)

a screen protector from channel sponsor, Dbrand.

I've been using these for like,

the better part of a year now, and I think they're great.

They obviously protect the glass

and they're super easy to install.

So if you wanna pop one on,

maybe it saved your phone from something and cracked

and you wanna replace it,

you kind of just swipe down from the middle.

It aligns, squeegee the bubbles out and you're good.

So that's what I've been doing.

Now you already know what time of year it is,

and thanks to Dbrand's Black Friday sale,

you can grab a Prism and save 40%

when you bundle it with a Grip Case,

40% when you bundle it with a Ghost Case

or 25% if you pair it with their all-new,

super-rugged Tank Case.

They've got other legit deals going on right now too.

You can save $45 on a Killswitch kit,

50% off Darkplates, and, get this,

every order comes with a free set

of these ridiculously over the top

Dbrand custom playing cards, which is pretty crazy.

I've been plugging Dbrand stuff

for the better part of a decade now.

But if you've ever been on the fence

about checking out any of this stuff,

now would be the time with these crazy discounts.

So links will be below. Check it out if you want.

Thanks for watching.

Catch you guys on the next one.

Peace.

(futuristic digital music)