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!
