Firmware bot
āDear Nothing & CMF Development Team,
āMy name is Gowri Shankar, and I am writing this long message not out of anger, but out of deep heartbreak, disappointment, and helplessness as a loyal CMF Phone 2 Pro user.
āWhen I bought the CMF Phone 2 Pro, I didnāt just buy a smartphoneāI put my hard-earned money and complete trust into Carl Peiās vision and the Nothing community. I loved this phone so much at the beginning that I proudly recommended it to my close friends (Sivashankar, Manoj, and Althaf), and they bought the exact same phone trusting my words. Today, I feel genuinely embarrassed to even look at them because the recent updates have completely ruined the camera on all of our phones.
āWhen the previous update (B4.1-260812-1729) ruined our camera quality, we stayed patient. We told ourselves, āNothing listens to its community; they will surely fix it in the next update.ā So when Nothing OS B4.1-260928-1137 arrived a few days ago with the changelog āGeneral Improvements and Bug Fixesā, I updated my phone with so much hope.
āBut to my absolute shock, instead of fixing the camera, this update has dragged the camera quality down to an even worse, rock-bottom level! It hurts to see a phone that once took beautiful, crisp shots turn into something we donāt even feel like pulling out of our pockets anymore.
āPlease look at what we are going through every single day after this update:
ā1. Portrait Mode is Completely Dead (Our Biggest Heartbreak):
Most of us use our phone cameras to capture memories with friends and family through Portrait mode. Right now, Portrait mode is 100% unusable. Every single portrait shot looks lifeless, dull, and washed out. Even with all beauty filters turned off, faces look like a smudged āoil paintingā or plastic doll. Natural skin tones are gone, hair and eye details are completely blurred out, and the background blur (edge detection) is broken and patchy. We literally cannot take a single decent photo of a person anymore.
ā2. Video Recording Quality is Ruined:
Recording videos has become so frustrating. Whether in 1080p or 4K, videos look terribly soft, grainy, and compressedāeven in bright daylight. The stabilization stutters when moving the hand slightly, autofocus keeps hunting back and forth, and the lighting/dynamic range is completely messed up.
ā3. Loss of Sharpness Across 1x, 2x & Ultra-Wide Lenses:
In normal photo mode, the moment the gallery finishes post-processing, all the sharpness disappears. The 2x zoomāwhich used to be so good for framing shotsānow produces blurry, pixelated images. Even the 0.6x Ultra-Wide has lost its clarity. Worst of all, we cannot even use third-party cameras like GCam as a temporary relief because the 2x optical/in-sensor zoom and Ultra-Wide lenses do not work there. We are completely trapped with a broken stock camera!
ā4. Why Push Bloatware & Glitches Instead of Fixing the Camera?
We joined the Nothing family because you promised a clean, fast, bloatware-free OS. Why are recent updates sneaking in unwanted bloatware while hiding behind a one-line āGeneral Improvements and Bug Fixesā changelog? While I honestly appreciate that the battery backup is still good, the phone now suffers from random UI glitches, stutters, and heavy shutter lag in the camera app.
ā5. We Have Tried Everything From Our Side:
Before any moderator asks us to do basic stepsāI have already cleared Camera app storage and cache, reset app preferences, turned off Ultra XDR/HDR, and rebooted the device multiple times. Nothing works because this is a pure ISP software tuning regression from your end, affecting every single CMF Phone 2 Pro user in my circle.
āMy Humble Request & Plea to the Developers:
āDear Nothing Engineers, I am literally begging you on behalf of myself and my friendsāPLEASE fix this in the very next update!
āFor many of us, this is our primary device that we saved up to buy, and we capture all our daily life moments on it. Every festival, outing, and moment with friends is being ruined because the camera cannot take a clear photo or portrait anymore. Please donāt ignore us with an automated reply.
āPlease pass this directly to your Camera/ISP tuning team. Roll back whatever faulty image processing was added in the last two updates, remove the aggressive smoothing, and please bring back the original crisp Portrait, Video, and Photo quality in the immediate next OTA patch.
āWe still want to believe that Nothing cares for its users. Please donāt let us down. We are desperately waiting for the next update to make our phones usable again.
āWith hope and regards,
Gowri Shankar
