When Carl Pei, co-founder of OnePlus, presented his new project Nothing, one thing was clear: he was going to leave no one indifferent. The company’s first smartphone, the Nothing phone (1), represents this very well.
[4 cosas del Nothing phone (1) que tendrían que tener todos los móviles (y no son los LEDs)]
It is not only the most original mobile of 2022, it is also a controversial device due to its design and some controversial decisions; the last, the delay of Android 13.
Android 13 for nothing
While most manufacturers have presented their update plans, and even though many have already updated a good part of their range, Nothing has remained silent. Users wondered if the weak point of their smartphone was going to be in the support; However, it is not as if the mobile has not received updates (some, in fact, brought new features).
Finally, today Nothing could announce the launch of the beta version of Android 13 for the phone (1). Although he calls it “open beta”, it is actually necessary to register using a form and not all users are admitted; Anyway, at least there are already concrete plans, and an explanation of why they’ve taken so long, with an interview Carl Pei gave to Android Authority.
The basic explanation is that Nothing is still a young and therefore small company, which has even struggled to fill all the positions it has. To prove it, Pei tells a curious anecdote: the company’s first programmer, the only one they managed to attract, quit after two days. And when Nothing OS started development, the company had just five engineers.
Developing a system with so few human resources is impossible (even a system that is not built from scratch), so Nothing outsourced 400 engineers from another Android manufacturer, whose name has not been made public. The problem is that, according to Pei, these engineers didn’t have the experience to create a complete system, nor the motivation to work on a system that wasn’t going to be used on their mobiles.
That’s the excuse Pei gives for why Nothing OS was basically a pretty “skin” on a stock Android 12, with very little on its own. The good news is that this is about to change: Nothing now employs 100 engineers and is already developing the system on its own.
The Android 13 update will be called Nothing OS 1.5and will bring important new features such as a 50% improvement in app loading speed, the adoption of Material You with wallpaper-based color schemes, and privacy improvements with permissions to notification.
Most of the new features announced are just what’s new in Android 13, so clearly the system itself won’t change much. Let’s go for Nothing OS 2.0, which will be much more ambitious according to Pei.