Well that was exciting! The thread got to 140 replies, and thank you for taking the time to talk. Thanks particularly to @abrahambatresw , @Filip_BTMKD and @_8OMIC_ who went through all three questions, and plenty of others took at least one of them seriously. That is more useful to us than anything I could have worked out on my own. - that is more useful to us than anything I could have worked out on my own. Here is what I heard.
What makes Nothing good?
Two answers came back, and they aren’t quite the same answer.
The first is about absence. @ceye4n bought a Phone (2a) Plus because it had no annoying garbage, and described their phone as a tool that does what they want and gets out of the way. @Филип put it better than I could - “tech that doesn’t eat your analog life”. @Neon_Pacing said their screen time has actually gone down since switching, which is the one thing I can’t get from analytics.
The second is about coherence rather than restraint. @abrahambatresw made the point that stuck with me most: other skins offer more customisation but trade quality for quantity, so the options are all there and then nothing looks right together. We offer fewer, and every one should feel finished. They described our open and close animation as “I’m here as soon as you need, but I’m out of here as soon as you don’t”, which I have now quoted to my team twice.
Then a third group answered with customisation - the freedom to make the phone yours.
That is the tension we actually live with. Open everything up and it stops feeling like a Nothing phone. Lock it down and it stops being yours. There is a balance we need to strike.
What would be un-Nothing?
Preloaded software you didn’t ask for, by a long way. @ceye4n made the point that people buy our phones partly to get away from that, so finding it here lands harder than it would on another brand.
My honest position: I don’t want us shipping anything that demands your attention and gives nothing back, or that you have no way to turn down. We will work with partners who can bring value to our users, and sometimes that also helps us keep the price where it is. So the test I would apply isn’t whether something is preloaded. It’s whether you can say no to it, and whether it’s any good if you say yes.
Close behind was AI added because AI is fashionable - @Филип described the version of us nobody wants, transparent hardware with an untransparent privacy policy. @Til21 🇩🇪 1 said cheap copies of other systems, and warned us about drifting too playful. Both fair.
Several of you raised features that only arrive on newer phones. Sometimes there is a real limit - a feature has to be enabled by Google, then by the chip manufacturer, before we can adopt it. When we don’t explain that, it looks commercial. The silence is our fault, not yours.
One thing made me laugh. The most requested app in the thread was a Nothing dialler, while others answered this question by saying that building our own versions of mature apps is exactly the wrong thing for us to do. @anjanyadavby made that case better than I did.
What should I write about next?
Your suggestions, in no particular order:
The things we considered and decided not to build @abrahambatresw
How research and analytics actually turn into a brief, with a real example @Uday
Prioritisation explained for people who don’t work in tech, and why every new Android version costs us so much @Филип
How AI develops across Nothing OS and Essential, what stays on the device and what goes to the cloud, and how far agentic features could go @bein
Some of these I can talk about more freely than others, so I won’t promise an order. Tell me which you’d most like to read.
Two last things
Lots of you posted bugs and specific requests. This isn’t the best place for them - the teams watch the Nothing OS 5.0 feedback discussion far more closely than they watch me, so post them there and they’ll get seen.
My apologies if I have mistagged anyone, I’m still getting used to this forum.
Keep it coming. I’ll be back with the next one.
