I was lucky enough to be selected for the Nothing OS 5.0 Community Review Program and have been running the media beta version for the last week. I was expecting some changes, but I was not ready for all that’s coming. From new widgets to a new theme and default system font there’s a lot to see. Let’s get into it.

Lucent – translucency comes to your phone’s homescreen

Nothing is famous for transparency; it’s a hallmark of their hardware industrial design. So, it was only a matter of time until they decided to dip their toes into the pool of transparency. Introducing Lucent, a theme that brings translucent elements to your phone homescreen.

It’s very well done even at this stage of the development process. Lucent adds transparency effect and pops of color to many first party widgets and a future update will enable app icons to adopt subtle color tints based on the primary wallpaper color. Here’s my current homescreen where you can see transparency and the widget color pop features in action.

I’m looking forward to seeing how the app icons look with the color tinting.

Geist

Have you used Nothing Playground? If you have then you’ve already seen the Geist typeface in action. If you haven’t used Playground yet, then you are in for a treat. The Geist typeface is a clean and easy-to-read font. Nothing has applied it thoughtfully through the OS (if you select it of course) making things more consistent ecosystem-wide.

Everyone loves widgets!

In their continuing effort to make it easier to more meaningfully interact with your phone while at the same time helping you reduce the amount of time you have your phone in front of your face, Nothing has created a few more widgets for us to use. First is the Away Time widget. This is a novel take on digital wellbeing where positive reinforcement is used to track the time spent NOT looking at your phone rather than cultivating guilt by tracking time spent looking at your phone.

Lucent theming is attractively implemented with the color tint from the wallpaper used as well as translucency. I really enjoy the look. Clicking on the widget opens a larger dialog showing your results for the week using a scatter plot with some nice averaging calculated for you as well as your weekly total.

There is also the Collector widget. The idea here is that you can take pictures or save images to your phone of things you enjoy and display them in a widget on your homescreen. I have mine set to cycle between pictures of my derpy dog and my granddaughter on every device unlock. So nice.

There is also a new Glyph Timer widget that lets you start a timer from your homescreen, and the countdown is displayed on the Glyph matrix on the back. My life doesn’t necessitate the use of timers often, but this is sure to be a hit with many people. Speaking of the Glyph matrix, while not a widget, Nothing has created a Glyph app that gets you into the Glyph Interface setup easier. I see this as reducing the difficulty to new users of the Glyph and any improvements to usability is to be commended in this day and age of overcomplication.

Lockscreen upgrades

While most of the interface upgrades were centered around the homescreen (and rightly so), Nothing didn’t forget about the lockscreen. There are (or will be…) two new clockfaces to choose from. First is the Gooey clockface. I’m not sure what I’d name this clockface font if I had to, but Gooey does seem accurate. It’s bold and like nothing I’ve seen before.

The clockface I’m really looking forward to getting in a future build is the Micrographics. Imagine a terminal interface with flair that shows time, date, weather, and calendar information. I’ve seen screenshots of it, and I am very excited to get it for myself. More to come on this one.

Last, Nothing has improved the depth effect feature. I don’t use it myself, but when I tried it out, I didn’t see a drastic change. Could just be my old eyes, I guess. If lockscreen depth effects are your thing hopefully this is meaningful to you.

There are significant under-the-hood improvements, too!

Nothing really wanted to improve the functionality of our phones, not just make the interface prettier. Here are a few of the changes that really stand out to me based on what I use my phone for.

QR code scanning. BIG improvement here. I carry two phones daily, my Phone (3) is my personal device, and my iPhone 17 Pro Max is what I use for work. Previously, I would use my iPhone to do my QR code scanning as it was a more reliable experience. The new QR code scanner on my Phone (3) is so much better now, and I no longer juggle the two phones for this purpose.
The camera interface was streamlined; I find it’s easier to locate the control I’m looking for now.

Nothing OS 5.0 uses machine learning to identify apps that are most often used to keep them pre-loaded. Along with RAM optimization that happens overnight and background CPU and RAM utilization improvements, system performance has received a major boost. This was evident after just a couple days of extended use.

Is AI your thing?

If AI is your thing, then Nothing has a few treats for you. First, Essential Space has a new feature called Smart Collections which will allow the system to create new collections based on context. Further, it can recommend content for existing collections.

Next, a biggie. You can now build Essential Apps right on your phone rather than on the web app once you get allowed into the system. I was in previously, so I didn’t need to wait – too bad my prompting skills don’t match my ability to program in other systems 😂.

Then, Essential Voice got some major upgrades. Recording and transcription is now much faster with improved output quality. You can see the words on-screen as you speak, way less laggy. Also, if you have Ear (3) the Super Mic can now be used with Essential Voice. And there are now over 100 languages supported in transcription and more than 70 in translation.

Finally, MCP comes to Nothing OS. You can connect agents from select providers, Anthropic and OpenAI first and foremost. This is where I am disappointed with Nothing in that there are currently no plans for Google Gemini to join in here. This seems like a big miss, and I’ve been asking Nothing to integrate Gemini (and previously Assistant) into their AI features going back to when they integrated ChatGPT into Nothing OS and their Ear products over 2 years ago. I would love to see Gemini support added across the Nothing ecosystem.

Android 17 brings goodness, too!

Nothing engineers weren’t the only ones to add features. Android 17 packs a punch also. Here are the biggies for me:

Have you seen Noto 3D emojis?
You can now have separated notification and quick setting shades. This is off by default, but you can enable this feature and a pull down on the left side will cause the notification shade to slide down. Pulling down on the right side will cause the quick settings shade to slide down.
Assistant volume can be adjusted individually.
There are now dedicated adjustments for HDR video and image playback. This one was a long time coming if you ask me.
If dark mode is how you like to set your phone, with Expanded Dark Theme you can now force even more of those holdouts into dark mode. Plus, there is now an extra dark mode that makes the dark gray go black. This is another feature that was a long time coming.

Final thoughts

What a ride, right? I remember when Nothing OS 4 rolled out how we were left feeling a tad underwhelmed because of a lack of aesthetic design changes. Well, Nothing brought their A game this year with a host of both aesthetic and system improvements. And they aren’t done cooking yet either. We’re still waiting on the Micrographics clockface which I think is going to be unbelievably popular.

This is not an exhaustive list of what’s in Nothing OS 5, this is what made it onto my radar as I’ve used my phone. Be sure to read other stories and watch some videos about this upgrade, I’m certain some other participant in this program will include a feature that I left out.