Amudhan_Sundararajan at my honest guess, this all will be Android-based and here’s why do I (and Carl also mentioned it somewhere) think so:
- World needs time to go from an app-system OS to AI-system OS. This can’t be done quickly. For example, our government recently published a law saying every smartphone must go with our local apps (including a “national” messenger and our own app store). So even iPhone that comes to our country any way just have these apps as pre-installed. So sellers are just ruining the package to do the thing by hand. Someone does not so he needs to put a note for purchasers that this phone isn’t having national apps. As for me, I’m not gonna install then either way and better find another old mobile from my phone to install on instead of it. Because we all know this is not a happy Telegram-like app, but… well, that’s another story. I happy I bought my Nothingie before that stupid law.
- Another point is: will popular apps go to the new OS? Like of course it’ll be a whole new experience without apps in future, but for first they likely will be integrated a bit at my guess, so nothing will go as fast to prevent bugs, this requires lots of testing. Not every company will agree to join that experiment. Remember the prime era of Symbian, Bada OS, Blackberry OS (which had most of the features we both on iOS and Android have now!), Windows Phone. No one wanted to create apps for them unlike for Android and iOS.
- Let’s think logically: how to make things better but also make it that way, so people would want to try this. If Nothing will just implement their own OS right now, many of us just will go away from a brand likely. Or, at the other hand, just buy as a toy “Rabbit R1” that’s not really used, let’s say. Is that the future we want for Nothing? At first that hyper-personalized OS experience must go on Android, so people could buy a regular phone with regular apps support, but also with all this AI stuff. And when they’ll realise that AI does most of the stuff they do in real life and most of the apps are becoming pretty useless for them — they’ll potentially switch over Android OS to Nothing OS.
- So maybe there also could be a period when both OS in Nothing exists. We could try both and compare the overall experience to see if it’s changing. So that way it will succeed then.
- Another story is to integrate with Android to re-create a whole current OS-experience that will run with Nothing first. Like once HTC made the first ever Android-smartphone. But if Nothing wishes to be the one and only in this run for the next years, I don’t think this will work. But as an idea.
And let’s not forget about an open ecosystem that Carl also wants to create. This is why creating their own AI-experience shouldn’t harm an overall experience with using, for example, Ear’s or Headphone with non-Nothing smartphones. Because I already realised and felt what’s happening with Samsung that’s completely started to close its ecosystem like Apple. This is definitely not the company’s way.
So, bringing bold but systematic steps will drive all of us to the future they (I mean team) imagine for.
