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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
