Nothing’s DIY app service has huge potential – but will enough people be on board?

Nothing has announced a new highly customisable smartphone interface called Essential, which promises to be “the first step towards a new kind of AI-native operating system”.

The new Essential interface is intended as a step away from the current accepted practice for smartphone operating systems – including Nothing OS itself, which is built on Android – typified by rows of app icons all designed to hog your attention.

To that end, Nothing is introducing the Playground platform, which promises to let you essentially design your own app – or rather, your own combination of app functions – using natural language inputs.

Using the example provided by Nothing, you might ask the platform to “capture receipts from my camera roll and export a finance-ready PDF every Friday”. Or to “create a mood tracker that syncs with a music playlist”.

Nothing summarises this approach as “hyper-personalised experiences that help in daily life”, and it certainly sounds useful.

Once your command has been inputted, a new Essential App will be generated and added to your Home Screen, leading to your fully bespoke outcome.

Playground, it seems, will offer a community hub of such automations. You can check out some initial submissions by clicking this link.

If Not This, Then What?

For all the claims that this is the future of smartphones, however, I can’t help but be reminded of the past. More specifically, of IFTTT. This company began in 2010, in the early days of the smartphone era and of the so-called ‘internet of things’ (aka IoT).

The idea for this service (and subsequently app) was to create a way for disparate apps, services, and connected devices to function together using a simple shared language framework.

The name IFTTT contains the whole idea: If This, Then That. As in, if this condition is met, then this device or service will perform that task.

It was a great idea, and indeed, the IFTTT app is still in existence today. It, too, has a community hub aspect where various recipes can be shared.

Apple even paid it the compliment of ‘borrowing’ some of its ideas with its Shortcuts app in 2018, albeit within a narrower iOS-focused context.

But here’s the thing with both IFTTT and Shortcuts: I feel confident that most people – iPhone users and otherwise – don’t use them. I certainly don’t, and I’m a seasoned tech journalist.

Can’t even be bothered

Why don’t I (and indeed most people) use these powerful automation tools? Mainly because we’re inherently lazy creatures, I’d venture.

Customisation is all well and good, but what I really want from my mobile platforms and applications is to do everything for me. I don’t want to be thinking about elaborate chains of commands and cause-and-effect operations, even if the semi-automated outcome sounds quite appealing.

I have no idea how intuitive Nothing’s proposed Essential/Playground UI is, of course, and the concept of simply spouting a phrase into a phone and getting an elaborate yet seamless chain of interlocking functions by way of a response is undoubtedly compelling.

Google Gemini and ChatGPT have already started to rewire and reconfigure how we interact with the internet, so who’s to say that Nothing’s suggestion isn’t the future, even only in the short term?

It’s going to be fascinating to find out. I just hope Nothing manages to overcome our (OK, my) inherent laziness when reimagining the mobile OS.