Hey Nothing community!

I recently attended my first board meeting after being elected to be your 2025 Community Board Observer. If you haven’t already, check out the Q4 2024 Community Update video, where I feature and share some of my immediate thoughts and comments after coming out of the meeting.

There were a lot of things to cover and I had to prioritise some of these for the video. Some of your positive pieces of feedback I covered were:

The sentiment around the rollout of Nothing OS 3.0. I shared that some users were initially upset that Phone (2a) received the OS 3.0 Open Beta before Phone (2) did, however the majority of people I saw were content with the explainer as to why this was the case, which also revealed that the general release of 3.0 would roll out to Phone (2) and (2a) simultaneously.

Your feedback on the Nothing Gallery app. While this is still in beta and can be treated as a preview before full release, there’s a clear demand for more advanced features. However, this is a good starting point for the Nothing Gallery - something which some users have wished for, for a long time.

The successful release of the Snake Game widget, being the first ever Community Widget  - with hopefully many more to come! I asked the team to lay down some foundations on how more community members can get involved with submitting ideas, designs or even coding your own community widget.

Onto a few of the more negative points. We talked about the lack of non-latin character support, both in the new Inter system font, and in the Watch Pro 2, meaning that you can’t use apps or read watch notifications in your native languages. The team have taken this on board and are looking to support more languages in upcoming updates.

I also mentioned the fragmented release of OS 3.0, with the Nothing Weather app and countdown widget initially missing. Despite these being shown in promotional materials, they weren’t ready for release alongside Nothing OS 3.0. The team have assured me that the Weather app update is coming and will start rolling out late February.

I relayed feedback on some concerns around the display quality of Phone (2a), which the team are aware of and are actively working on improving. For those that are experiencing hardware related issues, please do get in contact with Nothing support via the official channels.

Due to time constraints, a couple of points didn’t make the cut for the video.

One of these was around the OS bug reporting and feedback option built into Nothing OS, and the often irrelevant templated responses that come from support. The team are going to look at changing the user journey here to improve the experience using the feedback feature. As well as bringing this to the board, I also spoke to Tom, the Customer Experience Manager, who’s going to raise these issues from his side too. He has assured me that your feedback is getting to the right team - so please continue to report bugs and help make Nothing OS better for everyone!

I touched upon the fact that some Phone (2) users are still experiencing battery drain and poor camera performance. The team informed me that reports of battery drain have significantly reduced since OS 3.0, but they’re still collecting logs for anyone experiencing this. In relation to camera performance, the focus is now on optimising upcoming devices, but Carl mentioned a new camera tuning method they’re using, which, if improvements are made, may be able to be rolled out to the current device line-up in future too.

One more discussion we had was around the self service repairability potential for Nothing devices, which was mentioned in the 2022 sustainability report but something that we haven’t yet seen. The team let me know that they’re striving towards having self-repairable devices and are getting closer and closer to achieving this goal with every new release. They’re going to take a closer look at this as an action.

Another discussion point was the Glyph Developer kit and the long wait times some developers are facing after requesting an API key; causing a knock on effect with app development timescales and putting developers off integrating their apps with the glyph interface. The team are aware of this and hope to increase the frequency of replying to these requests.

While there were many pieces of feedback I saw across the community, I hope to have covered the points you feel are more important to you during this meeting. If you have anything you’d like me to consider for the next board meeting, please leave it down below or reach out to me on my socials - available on my profile.

I’m looking forward to what 2025 brings, it seems like it’ll be an exciting year for Nothing, and I hope to see some of you at community events this year too! As always, I’ll speak to you all around the community!

    “In relation to camera performance, the focus is now on optimising upcoming devices, but Carl mentioned a new camera tuning method they’re using, which, if improvements are made, may be able to be rolled out to the current device line-up in future too.”

    🤩

    Could you elaborate a little more on this point? Would it be for this year?

      Great work to everyone ! Hope to see more soon !

      Thank you for bringing the Glyph Developer Kit and support issues to the boards attention 🙌

      Hi @adbo , I have a question. Will we get all the widgets that @Rahul presented?

        Good work Adam.

        March 4 seems so far away 😅.

        “In relation to camera performance, the focus is now on optimising upcoming devices, but Carl mentioned a new camera tuning method they’re using, which, if improvements are made, may be able to be rolled out to the current device line-up in future too.”

        Does “May be rolled out to the current device line up” imply that there is a possibility that we might not see any updates to the camera performance?

        Hey @adbo Thank you Adam for bringing up the issue of Glyph Developer Kit. I was facing that issue and still facing. The team have informed me that they will send the API after February so waiting till then to release the beta. But thank you to raise this issue to the team

        RuudHesp Hey, there’s no specific information on this point. With the Phone (3a) series and Phone (3) coming this year, we can expect that the tunings for these devices will be completed before they release, but we’ll have to wait and see regarding existing devices. I’ll be sure to let you know if I hear anything!

        AnuragKumar_WroHwG9Nh5 Unfortunately I don’t have any information on this yet, but I’ve seen that this is a highly requested feature. Be sure to submit your feedback via Settings > System > Feedback too.

        Asy1bek47 As mentioned in the video, I’ve asked the team to lay down some foundations and guidelines on how community members can get more involved with creating their own community widgets. Hopefully we’ll see something of this soon, and that means more people can submit their ideas, designs or code and make these widgets a reality 🙂

        Thank you all for your love and support!

        adbo

        Yes , 3a will be nice for the people how love a “good” phone for the right price! Theres probably 75% people who wants that…… but theres 25% of people who want and “will” pay for a highend Smart phone! Dont forgot about them, because they will quickly leave and do exactly that!!! We’re nearly 2 years now!!!

          @ArtemisssMoon @adbo ofcourse man, they are openly saying these there will no camera improvements for phone 2. What the heck, we paid more money than your future devices. Your job is too point out the problems not to ignore things which are important.

            Irfansheikh Your job is too point out the problems not to ignore things which are important

            I believe I’ve done exactly that, and hopefully that’s evident in my write-up above. However I’m always open to feedback or discussion if you feel there are important points affecting the community that I may have missed

            Lots to digest, fantastic update! Thanks for representing the community so well and taking so much to board in your first outing. Look forward to future editions 🙂

            Thank you so much, you have really voiced out of our issues and preferences, really greatful 😊😊