This digest compiles the latest from The Verge.
Today’s The Verge Roundup
Asus may have made its last phone
19 Jan 2026, 2:10 pm by Dominic Preston
Asus chairman Jonney Shih told Taiwan’s Inside that the company is done making phones for now, marking the end of its Zenfone and ROG Phone lines.
“Asus will no longer add new mobile phone models in the future,” Shih reportedly said (translated with Google Translate). He didn’t entirely rule out a return though, instead saying the company is entering a state of “indefinite observation” of the market, and that it will “continue to take care of the brand’s mobile phone users.”
Asus’s own-brand phones haven’t been particularly exciting since the teeny-tiny Zenfone 10 in 2023, though its ROG Phone line has more or less been the gold standard …
Animal Crossing: New Horizons added just enough to suck me back in
19 Jan 2026, 2:00 pm by Kallie Plagge
Animal Crossing has always been anti-instant gratification. By design, you have to take your time, wait for days to pass in real time, and complete a seemingly endless list of chores to build a meaningful life with your animal friends. The slowness is part of its appeal. But with New Horizons, some of that slowness became tedious: crafting its many items one at a time, painstakingly building cliffs and rivers by hand, picking up and placing objects one by one.
As I gathered when I previewed it last month, the newly released, free 3.0 update for Animal Crossing: New Horizons addresses those issues with quality-of-life fixes that still fit t …
Threads overtakes X on mobile, but still lags far behind
19 Jan 2026, 11:53 am by Jess Weatherbed
After launching almost three years ago, Meta’s Threads is now reportedly attracting more daily mobile users than rival platform X. According to Similarweb data shared by TechCrunch, Threads has 141.5 million daily active iOS and Android global app users as of January 7th, compared to 125 million users for Elon Musk’s mobile platform.
Similarweb reports that Threads actually overtook X sometime between late October and early November after a consistent period of growth, meaning this milestone wasn’t suddenly achieved in reaction to recent Grok-related controversies. X still has more mobile users than Threads in the US, according to Similarwe …
End of today’s The Verge roundup.
