Nothing’s failed Messages chats on the current Nothing Phone(2) — image credit: Nothing
In a diatribe against modern Apple, Nothing CEO Carl Pei has a vision for the entire smartphone industry that ignores the economic reality of smartphone apps, and claims that a soon-to-come smartphone won’t have any at all.
Nothing is a British smartphone company founded in 2021, which includes “father of the iPod” Tony Fadell. It’s phones have yet to make a splash, although its astoundingly insecure attempt to get Apple Messages onto them did back in 2023.
In a new interview with Wired, Nothing CEO Carl Pei admits that the company’s phones are not selling brilliantly. “The business is growing rapidly… last year, we grew about 150 percent,” he said, “[although] we still only reached about 0.1% share of the global market.”
But this doesn’t stop Pei predicting how all smartphones will work in the next seven to ten years, and along the way criticizing Apple and the iPhone.
“I believe that in the future, the entire phone will only have one app — and that will be the OS,” he says. “The OS will know its user well and will be optimized for that person.”
“Right now, you have to go through a step-by-step process of figuring out for yourself what you want to do, then unlocking your smartphone and going through it step by step,” he continues. “In the future, your phone will suggest what you want to do and then do it automatically for you… so it will be agentic and automated and proactive.”
Apple’s creative failure
“Apple today is very different from the Apple when I was younger,” said Pei. “Last year, they told a very big story about Apple Intelligence… now, a year later, it’s not much more than some generated emojis.”
Pei says that Apple used to get everything right. It “had the best design in the iPod,” and “the best interface,” that meant it had “the best integration of hardware and software.”
Now he says that Apple is so big that it has to target every possible user, whereas Nothing can focus on making better devices for a smaller group. “The smartphone market is becoming very boring,” he said. “We believe we are the only ones who can make it ‘fun’ again.”
The one-app future
You do have to ignore that Nothing’s phones, whether they are fun and more creative or not, are appealing to an extraordinarily tiny market so far. You also have to ignore Pei’s certainty that his one-app vision of the future will be here by 2032 or 2035.
But beyond that, a one-app future would mean the end of the entire app development economy. It would mean the smartphone manufacturer controlling the whole stack from hardware to this single app, which might profit Nothing, but would destroy millions of jobs.
And recent regulation and litigation has made it clear that global governments won’t allow a smartphone manufacturer to have that level of control. If Apple can’t, then Nothing can’t either.
Then the presumption that Apple is effectively out of the game as far as creative design goes, is an enormous reaction to the recently announced delays to Apple Intelligence. Ultimately, Apple will not be affected by that delay.
It won’t be bothered creatively. It certainly won’t be struck financially by it at all.
Pei’s interview comes ahead of the release of the Nothing Phone 3, which the company has teased will launch in July 2025. Confusing, the company has already launched a Nothing Phone(3a), but says this next model will be a flagship one.
Samsung is rumored to be releasing its own flagship phones around the same time, and Apple will launch the iPhone 17 range in September.
