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Samsung’s Galaxy Note 10 and 10+ arrived yesterday. The two new devices are in the high end of the U.S. smartphone market, but the industry at large is finding it harder and harder to make phones that are better than what most people already have. For context — if you’re an iPhone user — the Note 10 has a similar feel to the iPhone XS (but it’s bigger). It’s also comparable in price — the Note 10 is $949, only slightly cheaper than Apple’s $999 iPhone XS. 📱

What’s different: If you like to jot down notes, the Note 10 comes with a sleek-looking stylus. The phone’s new features also include improved video editing, AR doodling and “Air Actions,” or gestures made using the stylus to control apps. Similar to new iPhone models, there’s no headphone jack (a first for this line).

It’s worth noting that analysts are forecasting a decline in smartphone sales in 2019, with worldwide smartphone sales reportedly declining by 2.5% from last year. 👀

As a result, releases from smartphone manufacturers have been neck and neck, and foldable phones are on the horizon.

Would you get the Galaxy Note 10 over the iPhone? Vote here.

Or you could kick it old school and get one of these.

You’re probably familiar with Gin Lane’s work, even if you’ve never heard of them.

The New York-based agency is behind the branding for Hims, Everlane, Warby Parker, Recess, Harry’s, SmileDirectClub and Quip, to name a few. The firm has been widely credited for using catchy copy, modern fonts, and muted pastels to help consumer-facing startups turn into legitimate “challenger brands” in age-old categories (i.e. glasses, razors, toothbrushes, etc.).

“The branding and landing page for this is very well done. CBD and THC-based products often feel slimy or marketed toward the 'stoner' crowd. This feels like an art project, inspiring curiosity," - Ryan, on Recess

“Zero friction to talk with doctors. Great branding.” - Annelies, on Hims

But yesterday, Gin Lane announced a pivot of sorts: it’s phasing out all of its clients. 👋

Instead, the company is rebranding itself to Pattern, which will become a direct-to-consumer holding company for up to five different lifestyle brands.

The details: Pattern — which, according to the company, represents the habits people form each day — is on a mission to “bring back enjoyment.” In practice, that means Pattern plans to launch a series of products that help people be more present in their daily lives and counter the growing culture that’s addicted to work, productivity and technology.

With its anti-burnout thesis at the helm, Pattern also adapted the moniker “Direct with Consumer” (or DWC) to describe its approach to building these brands.

“Pattern's DWC model is built to create intimacy at scale through deeper, more personal consumer relationships through a multi-brand approach serving customers across various aspects of their life over time,” Pattern co-founder Emmet Shine told us.

While it’s still a little vague what “Direct with Consumer” actually means, it seems like Pattern plans to launch brands that will combine certain elements of product and community from the beginning.

The first product out of Pattern is a cooking brand called Equal Parts, which wants to help people find comfort and intuition in the kitchen through cookware (physical products) and guidance (in-person events and content). According to Shine, future brands will focus on other activities that foster daily enjoyment, such as organizing and maintaining a home or learning new hobbies.

What’s next: With $14M in venture funding in the bank, Pattern plans to role out more brands in 2020. Stay tuned! 👀

“I'm gonna take my startup down to Sand Hill Rd, I'm gonna raise till I can't no mo,” begins LJ Erwin's “Sand Hill Road,” a remixed version of Lil Nas X's chart-topping hit “Old Town Road.” He released the song on Twitter and YouTube this morning.

According to LJ, who works at Google Cloud for Startups and was previously a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, the tech-themed ode to Old Town Road started as a fun weekend project while he was brainstorming a Hamilton-style hip-hop parody rap about Silicon Valley. Inspired by a teen bumping Old Town Road on a Bird scooter (true story), LJ put pen to paper.

Lyrics like “iWatch matted black, got the Allbird's black to match” and “I’mma 2x founder, Soylent in my bladder“ came flooding out.

While the project started in jest, LJ decided to produce the song — raps, chorus, singing and all — for a worthy cause.

“Lil Nas X and what he represents inspires me. He recently opened up about his sexuality, which sparked diversity discussions in both hip-hop and country music industries alike. I hope that any buzz generated from "Sand Hill Road (The Remix)" can be used to highlight organizations that are impacting diversity and inclusion in tech, such as Code2040, Girls Who Code, Kapor Center, dev/color, Black & Brown Founders, Lesbians Who Tech, Techqueria and AnitaB.org. The new artist path closely parallels that of an early stage founder, who is also on a mission to transform their vision into reality, despite the odds. Although this project started as a writing challenge, I hope the song becomes a rally anthem for founders.“

Read the full story and listen to Sand Hill Road (The Remix) here. Official lyrics included. 🤠

Plot twist: electric scooters are worse for the environment than you think.

Last week, a new study from North Carolina State University found that while shared e-scooters are more environmentally friendly than owning a personal car, they emit more greenhouse gas emissions per passenger mile than buses with high ridership, personally owned electric bikes or traditional bikes.

The problem: E-scooters seem green, meaning scooters companies market their environmentally friendly qualities to woo users and regulators. Bird has an entire page on their site dedicated to it. So does Lime. Of course, scooters are electric, and therefore carbon-free. The larger environmental impact lies in the emissions produced by the manufacturing, transportation (they’re usually shipped from China), upkeep, and maintenance of these scooters. And according to the study, ~half of e-scooter riders says that would have biked, walked or not taken a trip at all if it wasn’t for scooters.

The reports’ authors recommended that e-scooter companies ensure their scooters last as long as they can, estimating a scooter’s average lifetime around six to 24 months. Unfortunately, scooters reportedly last closer to four and a half months.

If you’re an avid scooter rider, here are some products that might help offset your carbon footprint:

🙌 Wren lets you calculate emissions and fund offset projects

🌏 Cloverly is an API for carbon offsets

👀 Carbon Trim shows you your carbon footprint for daily actions

👏 Offcents helps you travel with zero carbon emissions

And here are 18 more products working to to save the planet.

Problem: The apps on your phone are too addictive. Solution: Generate a fake app to replace said addictive apps.

At least that’s the idea behind Detoxify, a tool that helps you detox off your most addictive apps (think Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc.). 👋

“Our app enables you to generate fake apps which looks exactly like your addictive apps. Once you replace your apps with the fake ones, every time you open them, you'll be faced with an screen that congrats you on getting detoxified. After a while, you'll get detoxified by un-learning the habit of opening addictive apps randomly all the time,” Detoxify Maker Farbod Saraf wrote on Product Hunt.

Farbod explains that forming habits — like not checking addictive mobile apps — requires a cue. In this case, the “fake” app acts as a signal to remind you of your goals to not revisit certain apps based on habits.

“By installing the fake app, you'll be surprised how many times you unconsciously you open them, although you are aware that they are fake apps. It feels like our brain is on auto-pilot, once we're hooked/addicted to unconsciously open addictive apps.”

Some realizations from the community:

“Can't believe how many times I open social media in just one day” - Ivan

“I have deleted apps off of my phone for periods of time to remind myself how much i use them and see what it is like to go without them. But this seems like another interesting solution” - Colin

Would you use this to become less addicted to your phone? Let us know.

While you’re detoxing, some other tools to consider:

• Write for writers and bloggers
• Newsfeed Burner for distractions on Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube
• Moment for data nerds (like us)
• Feedless for fighting your endless scrolling
• NoPhone for addicted Android owners

Today’s Daily Digest was crafted by Product Hunt and sponsored by our friends at monday.com. 

Earlier this week, monday.com raised a whopping $150M funding round at a $1.9B valuation. The raise comes after a period of rapid expansion for the company, which now counts over 70K teams as customers. Among those customers: Discovery Channel, Carlsberg Group, WeWork, and Fiverr. 👀

At its core, monday.com is a work management tool designed to help teams collaborate.

What it looks like: monday.com lets you track everything your team is working on with customizable columns to fit your team's workflow. It's like a spreadsheet, but more intuitive and visual in how it tracks progress.

How it works: You can communicate directly in projects to keep conversations centralized and get a high-level overview of metrics with Dashboards. You can also easily communicate with others on your team using @ mentions, or pass projects outside of your organization through shareable boards. 🙌

More features: The platform also integrates with other services like Slack, Trello, Dropbox, and Google Drive, with build-in automations to save your team time on manual processes.

From the Product Hunt community:

"I love Monday, truly. It's beautiful and strikes a great balance between clean and intuitive and deep functionality." - Jason

“Friendly, modern an intuitive UI. Limitless applications. Visual, overview, fantastic support, rapid development of even more features." - Bart

“My definition of an agile tool. Combines all that my team needs in one place.” - John

It appears there’s big business in altering your face. Tel Aviv-based Lightricks, the maker of photo editing app Facetune, just raised $135M at a $1B post-money valuation.

Facetune’s photo editing tool first came out ~ six years ago, and re-launched in 2016 with Facetune 2 (which is free to download but requires users to pay $5.99/month to unlock all of its features). The app was Apple’s most popular paid app of 2017 and reportedly boasts over one million paying subscribers to date.

If you’re not familiar with Facetune, you may have seen it in use on Instagram. People can use it to digitally manipulate their images, whether they want to cover a grey hair, slim down a body part, smooth over their skin or contort their expression.

We dug into the reviews on Product Hunt to see what people think of the app:

“This app is mind blowing and insanely powerful. This is an augmented reality app under the guise of a selfie editor. You can change the shape of you lips, nose, eye width, height, etc in real time (and not to presets like in Snapchat's 'beauty filter'). This is the next, natural evolution of the beautification of our online monikers” - Nick

“A daily use application!” - Dir

A recurrent theme in the comments: It’s only a matter of time before Facetune gets acquired by a big tech company. 🤑

“This is an unbelievable amazing app with an unbelievable amazing team. I won't be surprised to see a 150M+ acquisition from Facebook / Apple / Google etc.” - Rotem

“Obvious candidate for a Snap or Facebook acquisition.” - Bas (on Memoji by Facetune)

But Facetune’s parent company may be doing more of the acquiring. Lightricks plans to use part of the funding to strategically buy other companies.

While it’s been reported that apps like Facetune are making more people feel unhappy with their IRL appearance, we decided to scope out the app’s App Store reviews to see what users had to say. Surprisingly, people expressed more concern over the price of the app rather than its mental health implications.

A sampling:

“Overall, it’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with the effects if they’re used correctly. My biggest problem comes from the subscription fees. I use mobile Photoshop constantly with people’s faces and it feels almost insulting to see that the only things available to non-payers to use are the things that are already available in Photoshop.”

“I’m really disappointed that Facetune decided to go with a subscription model. I probably wouldn’t even mind it too much if it wasn’t this expensive! I’m so tempted to buy this app but honestly every time I just have to remind myself it’s not worth it.”

“I love the app so much that I’m still rating it 5 stars, even through my wallet is hurting.”

This may have been our favorite Maker comment ever:

“I’m excited to announce Buttsss, the most daring collection of round and beautiful butt illustrations in the universe. You can use these GIFs on your pitch deck, your product screens, your marketing campaigns, your business presentations, or your motivational speeches. Buttsss is entirely comprehensive, with innovations that enable creativity and collaboration across every dimension of a project. You can create responsive butt grids, rapid butt prototyping, advanced butt animations, mighty butt design systems, and seamless butt collaboration, all in one place” - Buttsss Maker Pablo Stanley.

If you haven’t already gathered, Pablo’s latest launch was a comprehensive collection of butt illustrations, ranging from “Frida Butthlo” to “UX Butt” to “Flexing Butt.” Tell us your favorite here. 🍑

“Thank you, Pablo for making this Monday a butt-er Monday.” - Julie

“The internet is complete now.” - Panagiotis

“This might be my favorite thing I've seen on Product Hunt” - Mackenzie

“I expect at least $5M Series A at $100M pre-money for this b(ea)uttiful product” - Vivek

Beyond Buttsss, Pablo has launched a number of innovative design collections and was a Golden Kitty Award finalist last year. There was Humaaans, a free library to mix and match illustrations of people. There was also Bottts and Avataaars, a similar idea but for robots and avatars, respectively. You may be noticing a theeeme.

Pablo also created Namasketch, a mini yoga session told through doodles. Last September, Pablo launched Latinxs Who Design, a directory of Latinxs in the design industry.

P.S. Buttsss isn’t the first popular butt product to hit Product Hunt.

Everything old is new again, they say. We’re certainly seeing that sentiment echoed in the tech industry, with more and more ~retro~ tech products launching.

On Friday, it was Poolside FM, a summer-y music website inspired by the ‘90s. When you land on the site’s landing page, you’re prompted ’Press Space to Enter the Pool’ and the virtual vacation of upbeat bops. The collection of songs (about 250 tracks) is pulled from SoundCloud, and listeners can watch short video clips of summer in the ‘80s.

“There's a lot of stuff to be sad about in the world at the moment, so we've created a virtual getaway – an healthy dose of serotonin straight to the brain,” Poolside FM Maker Marty Bell wrote on Product Hunt.

And the community loved it.

“This should be used as a case study for every web developer! From the responsiveness to the design to the easter eggs, Poolside FM is a masterpiece.” - Josh

“4 hours later, still playing 😎” - Julie

A sampling of some other inventive retro products if you want to go back in time (especially to the ‘80s):

👀 Retro App Store is the App Store, but in the ‘80s

👂 Retro AirPods are AirPods, if they were invented in the ‘80s

🎮 Playdate is a simple black and white gaming system (with a crank)

👾 Neon Drive is an ‘80s-style arcade game set in the future

🙌 Retro Patents are bespoke prints of keystone inventions

😍 The Internet Arcade houses over 900 classic arcade games

📱 WANLE iPhone Case turns your phone into a Gameboy console

And if you want to go back to today in Product Hunt history, you can always time travel here.

Today’s Daily Digest was crafted by Product Hunt and sponsored by our friends at Linode.

Happy sweet sixteen, Linode!

For the past 16 years, Linode, the world's largest independent open cloud provider, has been building a platform that is simple to develop, deploy, and scale. 💯

Who it’s for: Anyone from hobbyists to startups to developers to big businesses who need to deploy in environments without worrying about unpredictable pricing or vendor lock in.

To celebrate their birthday, the company is giving the Product Hunt community a $20 credit on new Linode accounts (promo code: LINODEPRODUCTHUNT).

To date, over 800,000 developers and businesses use Linode across its 10 data centers around the world. The company guarantees 99.9% uptime, which includes monitoring things like temperature and humidity, ensuring that you won’t sweat over the cloud computing system behind your next project.