Hi everyone!
We’ve released Open Beta 1 for Nothing OS 3.0 and had some feedback on the process. We love how passionate our users are and always listen when they take the time to share with us.
What’s happened?
Yesterday, 8 October, we invited everyone with a Phone (2a) to try out the beta version of Nothing OS 3.0. If you want to try it yourself, have a look here.
We also announced that access for Phone (2) will be in November and Phone (1) / Phone (2a) Plus / CMF Phone 1 in December.
Many of you have asked why we do this and why can’t we just do everything at once.
Here’s why
We are a young company – the only new one to successfully make phones in the last 10 years – with hungry and ambitious teams. This means we’re able to listen to your feedback and act on it directly. But it also means that we have a relatively smaller team than established brands developing and maintaining Nothing OS.
In turn, this means we have to make choices about how the teams do the work that’s needed to ensure we are maintaining the quality and pace of development we want. Staggering releases is a tried-and-tested method that even the biggest makers use (hello Samsung!) and it’s the one we’ve chosen as well. It allows us to gather the feedback we need to make adjustments and fixes that roll into the other devices in the portfolio.
Why Phone (2a) first?
A lot of people expected the Phone (2) to be the first device with access to the Nothing OS 3.0 beta. This was a fair expectation, and we are working toward that for the future. However, this time, we released the beta on the Phone (2a) first. Let me explain why.
To get the best feedback the fastest way, we’ve prioritised one of our newest and best-selling phones: Phone (2a). The Software team aim to use the larger sample size to collect the insight they need and then rapidly move to Phone (2) and close on Phone (1) / Phone (2a) Plus and CMF Phone 1.
Something you may not know is that we rely on our chipset partners for Android updates. Google provides the update to them, they ready and optimise it for their processors and then they provide it to us so we can implement it. We receive significant support from MediaTek in this process, allowing us to move more quickly on our products that use their SoC. So instead of holding it back to wait for the Phone (2) implementation, we wanted some of our users to start testing Nothing OS 3.0 beta as soon as possible. This allows us to begin collecting feedback and ensure we’re ready to start rolling out Nothing OS 3.0 public release by the end of the year.
We could do all the betas at the same time. But it would mean everyone waiting until January and further pushing out the full release. We talked about this option but rejected it as we felt you would prefer to try it as quickly as possible and, for us, it would mean delaying vital feedback.
What’s next
While this is what’s happening today, it’s not the experience we want for tomorrow. We are listening to you, scaling our capabilities and updating our processes. We’ll let you know more when we’ve finalised the plans.
And I’m happy to announce that the final release of Nothing OS 3.0 will be on Phone (2) and Phone (2a) first, and at the same time.
