Frankly, I’m too lazy to give feedback point by point anymore. And even when feedback is given, it doesn’t necessarily get optimized. I’m planning to switch to another phone for a while and come back later to see whether things have been fixed or improved. These are just my personal opinions for reference:
1. The biggest issue is animation and overall smoothness.
The animation issues have already been shared by others — for example, app icons frequently disappear when returning to the home screen. There are rumors that the latest launcher version (4.0.18) improves this situation, but so far I haven’t received the update myself, and there’s no APKMirror upload yet either, so we can only wait and see.
Smoothness is the second issue. Although the latest 424 update improved performance compared to the previous version, I still think there’s plenty of room for optimization. In fact, ever since Nothing Launcher updated its animations a few months ago, I feel like the whole phone experience has become less snappy. You could call it “smoother,” but frame drops during app opening and closing are now easier to notice. Last year, when I was using the 3a series, aside from the camera, I rarely felt the phone was sluggish. But on the 4a Pro, I notice delays much more often under the same background app conditions. So it’s hard for me to give a positive evaluation of the new animations and the current system smoothness.
2. Camera performance:
The photo quality itself is good, but video recording is still pretty mediocre. However, an even bigger issue than video is the photo processing.
I noticed that even in good lighting conditions, every photo takes an extremely long time to process in the gallery after pressing the shutter. I’ve never seen processing times this long on other mid-range phones. My impression is that the Nothing team is trying to “make photos look less digital through digital processing,” but this creates several problems:
1） The gallery processing makes the phone feel noticeably laggier.
While photos are being processed, the shutter becomes sluggish, sometimes taps on the shutter button don’t register at all, and interactions in other apps also feel sticky and less fluid. Stutters and frame drops become much more common.
2）Moving subjects can end up in different positions between the processed photo and the thumbnail shown immediately after pressing the shutter.
In other words, what you see is not what you get, even in good lighting conditions.
3）When taking multiple photos continuously, later shots sometimes seem to lose the processing algorithm entirely.
On top of that, turning HDR off still leaves a lot of post-processing in place, and issues like the lack of Night Mode beyond 7x zoom have been discussed for a long time already.
So yes, this camera system is capable of taking good photos, and I actually like the color tuning on this generation. But the consistency is poor. It can take good pictures, but it’s not very pleasant to use. Considering that the video recording is even worse than the photo experience, it’s hard for me to rate the camera positively overall.
These are the two main issues, and they’re also the two issues that affect the overall user experience the most.
Considering that in the German market the 3 is actually cheaper than the 4a Pro, I honestly can’t find any reason to buy the 4a Pro other than maybe its better-looking design. As someone who has used the 2a, CMF1, 3a, and 3a Pro, I’m not satisfied with this generation’s 4a Pro. I think the Nothing team really needs to optimize its performance as soon as possible.
