How we build Software

Dan🧑💻 · 2026-09-04T10:18:00+00:00

Hi! I’m Dan. I joined Nothing in January, and I am in charge of software for Nothing phones. If you watched the Nothing OS 5.0 video (the one where Carl is playing pool), I am the person chatting to Rob at the end. I’ve been speaking to @Louis ☕️, @Rohit and @Zac 🛸, and they suggested I start writing more on Nothing community. Transparency is a big part of what we do at Nothing, so I’ll be on here more regularly. I’ll share what I am thinking about Nothing software, and I want to know what you think too. — What do you do all day? Most of my job is about prioritisation. There are so many good ideas out there that Nothing could be building, but we have to decide which gets made. Sometimes this is based on user feedback, data and the market, and sometimes it’s a gut feel we have for something we really believe in. Let’s take Nothing OS 5.0 as an example - by now you should have a better understanding of what is coming, so I won’t rattle off features, but I’ll try and explain the thinking behind it. — Why do people buy our phones? We start by asking why users like Nothing phones, and our software. There are lots of ideas out there, here are just a few: It’s a rejection of other big phone companies, and feels distinct. That says something about the people who buy it - they have good taste in tech. For software, that means it should look and feel different to everything else. Touching grass - People are tired of having their attention sucked into their phone every day. “Nothing” means a life without unnecessary tech, just the stuff which you choose to include in your life. Cryptic and playful - “Nothing” is about making tech fun again, and it is meant to be a bit mysterious. You have to use our phones for a while to unlock their secrets. There are lots of others too - some of our features are focused on personal productivity, and sometimes we do stuff about creativity and personalisation. There are too many ideas. We cannot do all of them. The ideas that I am most excited about are the ones that tie back to how Nothing started. We are called “Nothing” - a rejection of needless excess. Our logo looks like it is from a dot matrix printer, our first phone was called phone (1), and our phones look like they are right off the production line - transparent enough for you to see the inner workings. We can apply these ideas to software - by keeping the design minimalistic but different and cool, by building features that help you stay away from your phone rather than dragging you back to it, and by keeping the OS as a simple blank canvas you can make your own. We used these ideas to decide what we built in Nothing OS 5.0. — Nothing OS 5.0 We wanted to focus on improving what we already do well, rather than adding things that might feel un-Nothing. We didn’t want to drift away from what made all of you like us in the first place. That is why we focused a lot on broad improvements to design and experience across the OS, rather than just one new area. We did a full audit of everything we have built over the last few years, looking for points of friction, and looking at how features are really being used after they go live. We know from looking at our analytics that a lot of our most interesting features aren’t used by everyone. For example, we know it takes a long time for users to configure Essential Notifications, and some never figure it out at all. This is our fault, not theirs, so we created the Glyph app to make this easier. We also know that if you are used to using OS4.1, sometimes it can feel basic in places - a lack of polish and character. We wanted to make using our OS every day delightful in lots of small ways, so we added a lot of UX improvements, upgraded the visual style, added more motion design, and tweaked the tech to make everything feel smoother and quicker. Where we have introduced new features we tried to base them on gaps we saw in how users actually use our phones. We visited stores, talked to users and took lots of photos of their homescreens and lock screens (even if their phone wasn’t a Nothing phone). We kept those near our product and design teams while we were working. We saw that some users wanted a detailed and techy UI, while some wanted their phone to look simple and slick. That’s why we created the two new lock screen clock faces - one minimal and stylish, one intricate and packed with information, almost like a terminal. We wanted everything we added to be inspired by a user’s needs and preferences, and built with love and creativity. You will have to tell us whether you think we’ve achieved our goal. — Why don’t you build a Nothing (insert existing app here)? We get a lot of requests from the community to build things like a Nothing Dialler, Messaging app or Calculator. We did build a Nothing Weather app, but haven’t expanded much beyond that. I can understand for many of you it is frustrating to drop out of the Nothing world into the Android world. The main reason we haven’t done this is comparing the cost to the benefit it brings. The dialler is a good example - there is a lot of regulation and requirements from carriers for diallers, covering things like emergencies and accessibility. The Google app also provides things like call screening, spam protection and caller ID. Building a new dialer is harder than it looks, and isn’t just a one-off cost - we’d have to keep spending money on it every time there was an Android update, regulatory change or carrier need. At the size we are, that would mean we’d have to deprioritize a lot of other things that we think are more valuable. It is again a question of prioritisation - if we did it, we’d either have to charge more for our phones, or do much less with our other software. The dialler is a very mature product - we don’t think there’s much value we can add in how it works right now. It would look better. It would not work better. We could make a calculator look like its from Nothing, but we can’t invent new Nothing maths. For the near future at least, we will be leaving most of the Google apps as-is, and focusing on making the overall OS shell and a few hero apps feel very Nothing. — What’s next? Our teams are focused on rolling out the Nothing OS 5.0 release across all supported devices, and are starting development on 5.1. Nothing OS 5.1 will be a smaller release, but still with a few exciting changes. (We will finally be allowing users to remap the Essential Key, for example). Lots of us are already starting to focus on what we do for Nothing OS 6.0 next year. This process should always start with talking to users, so we will be doing store visits, user interviews and hopefully talking to some of you over the next few months. It is still in the abstract stage at the moment - we are trying to refine our understanding of why people like Nothing phones, how their expectations of us are changing, and what is possible as technology evolves. 🗣️ I’d like to know what you think. You aren’t typical users, you are our core fans, so you know what feels like Nothing and what feels weird. What makes Nothing good? How would you describe it to a friend who has never heard of us? What would be an un-Nothing thing for us to build? Why would it feel wrong? If I keep writing about how we build software, what would you like to know about?

Daniel

Dan🧑‍💻 Thank you Dan for this write up! I’m sure our community members will appreciate the bits of information 🙂

Dan🧑‍💻

Daniel From one Daniel to another, thanks

Louis ☕️

Dan🧑‍💻 Great to catch up with you recently Dan, and really appreciate this write up. It was definitely interesting hearing your thoughts on NOS, and I’m sure the wider community will enjoy this too.

Dan🧑‍💻

Louis ☕️ Great to catch up with you too. It was a useful conversation for me - you asked for more transparency from software, which is why I wrote this

ChrisJ_Joseph_P1NpRo6vMr

This was interesting to read, I think it cleared the wider doubts of the community , thanks for the heads up regarding 5.1 😉🤩

neos

wow this really shows how different we (general public) think about software development compared to what actually goes into it. when i used to see those tweets and comments asking for a nothing dialer, i was on their side thinking - yeah why couldn’t they just make their own dialer. i never realised staying compliant with carrier regulations, accessibility standards, and google’s requirements is way harder than it looks. appreciate the breakdown, genuinely changed how i see it.
one thing i genuinely love is that a nothing homescreen is recognisable instantly, you see it and you just know it’s a nothing phone. the widgets, the icons, it doesn’t look like every other android skin out there. i want more of that. more of that uniqueness baked into everything. really excited for everything thats coming.
oh and please look into making camera app better.

_8OMIC_

Dan🧑‍💻 thank you, sir 🐱 for reaching out to the community. It was such a nice introduction to the software team and their works in Nothing , so far.

• Well, it’s been quite nice and for me the customisability & Software 🔧 are the topmost ☝🏿 things which make Nothing good. As for referring it to a friend 👥 , i might describe it as a bloatware free phone with customisable aesthetics along with the all-over dark theme ui which offers a uniqueness to it’s design in today’s world of tech 💻 where half of the brand UIs look all the same and to cover all of this , the phone design and comfort is another major thing which might feel the most unique.

• I guess building an ecosystem ♻️ where everything is fixed and none of it is neither customisable nor transparent to it’s user will be the most un-Nothing thing you can build. For me it will feel wrong because people choose nothing cause it offers variability in it’s brand , the design , the UI , the widgets . ig everyone here might agree with me that in current tech industry where the phones nowadays being all the same in design/UI , Nothing offers such a variety 🧐 of designs in every of their phones and options to make it your own. I mean even if we all have a same phone 📱 , we can all look different accordingly to our customisation, one new change and the experience is all new. So , ig nothing is all about giving users the freedom to choose for themselves.

• As for what I would like to know . I want to ask why Nothing has followed a dark/black 🖤 theme all over the UI ? Is it just a casual choice to make the UI more aesthetic and make colours more bright on it ?

🤗🤗🤗🤗🤗🤗🤗🤗🤗🤗🤗🤗🤗

Dan🧑‍💻

neos if you could improve one thing about the camera app, what would it be?

Dan🧑‍💻

_8OMIC_ interesting. One thing we wrestle with is getting the balance between allowing total customisation and putting in strong guardrails so that it still feels like a Nothing phone.

kopela5639

Dan🧑‍💻

_8OMIC_ We’ve looked at introducing new colours, as actually having a very restricted colour palate makes it difficult for designers - it’s harder to show the relationships between things, priority of information and stuff like that. When we do try it though, we often get feedback that it doesn’t feel like us. A balance to strike I guess.

RobIgo

Great to see you on the video and a nice introduction above! As a big Essential Space user I can’t wait to see what updates your team bring next (it’s great already, but lacking some basic features!) 😁

neos

Dan🧑‍💻 so when i’m in a hurry taking a photo of something, i open the camera and just snap it, then later realise it was set to 12mp the whole time. i’d really appreciate it if there was a way to make 50mp the default instead of something you have to remember to switch to.

and the photo often comes out soft and over smoothed. idk whats the solution for this but hope you guys can do sth about it.

grepGander

Dan🧑‍💻 I’ll add my own answer to that question: screen timeout being ignored when the camera app is open. It’s unbelievably annoying to use right now with timeout set to anything under 30 seconds. That’s it, the rest is great as it is (IMHO).

Dan🧑‍💻

kopela5639 yes we do listen to the community, but we don’t always do a good job of showing that.

When we kick off an OS we look at the most commonly requested things from the community and reviewers (which is why I put questions at the end of this article - answers can shape OS6.0).

We also take insights from other sources - we know the community are our most intensive users, so we try and get feedback from more casual users through interviews and store visits.

DJ

Dan🧑‍💻 For me, an option to turn off or reduce post-processing. The viewfinder looks balanced and natural but after clicking, the photo often becomes more contrasty and looks different from what I actually saw.

Dan🧑‍💻

RobIgo what do you use essential space for at the moment? How would you like to use it in future?

ChrisJ

Dan🧑‍💻 1 thing , I would really appreciate , regarding colors in nothing OS is that with lucent theme , we get 3 adaptive colours a 4th option with nothing OS red colour (the current one) to go along with lucent would be nice, if you can implement it 🥺 !!!!!!!!!!

RobIgo

Dan🧑‍💻 I mainly use it for sharing links (using the share to option) of articles I want to read later, Christmas present ideas, Future Trip ideas but also do capture stuff using the essential key often (I’m honestly a big fan and user).

The UI just needs more functions e.g. being able to add a to date/time to an existing capture (that doesn’t have one), being able to re-order Collections. The main one would be able to add a collection at the point of capture etc. Also maybe an Archive area (yes I know this is a bit like Google Keep) so you can keep the captures that are relevant for you at the moment in the space but other stuff archived (but you can still see it in a collection) so it’s less cluttered.

_8OMIC_

Dan🧑‍💻 thank you sir for a reply in such a short time 🤠. Providing your precious 💎 time to the community is a luxurious gift to the community members. Also , yeah ig it takes time for the users to adapt the UI with different colours as they’ve been addicted to the old aesthetics of the dark theme . Ig it’s the same as nothing phones , At first it offends people and many are confused about the design , but as the time passes they used to adapt and end up liking it instead. Nothing is also ig more about patiently watching it adapt to your daily life. I also had one last question sir , i.e. will we be able to see a larger range of tech in Nothing , like sort of an ecosystem as Apple 🍎 does ? I mean as for the current time , nothing has only expanded it’s reach to the audio 🎧 world , would it be possible for it to reach till the laptop 💻 , or tablet world ??? I mean will Nothing be making an ecosystem after it has spread it’s roots to the very end of tech ( which might take quite a decade 😅🥲 ).