Nothing launches Essential: An ‘AI Native OS’ that creates on-demand apps, simple overlay or revolution?
Following the release of Nothing OS 4.0, the London-based startup Nothing (founded by Carl Pei, former OnePlus executive) has introduced Essential, a new platform intended to serve as the foundation for its future ‘AI Native OS’.
Key features include Essential Apps, a tool for generating mini-apps from simple natural language requests, and Playground, a community marketplace where users can share and remix their creations.
However, beneath the buzzwords, the initiative is still far from being a true operating system: Essential operates on Android, and the “apps” being created are essentially just widgets.
Welcome to Essential. Your phone, created by you.
A Playground for you to create, share, and remix. pic.twitter.com/QJQazWyPYO
— Essential (@essential) September 30, 2025
Essential Apps: Apps Generated on Demand
With Essential Apps, Nothing users can describe their needs (“create an app that captures my receipts and exports a PDF every Friday”) and see a mini-application appear that they can add to their home screen.
These creations feed into Playground, designed as an “alternative app store” where anyone can download or transform apps created by the community. A first step that could pave the way for a new creator economy, according to Carl Pei, though no business model has yet been defined.
Ambitious Vision, Limited Reality
Pei envisions a future where phones adapt to users’ needs, suggesting or reorganizing apps based on habits. However, he acknowledges that Nothing does not intend to break free from Android:
“Android is an excellent platform for building. We aren’t touching low-level code,” he states in The Verge.
In other words: Essential is not (yet) an OS, but an AI overlay that enhances the traditional Android experience.
A Developing Ecosystem
Nothing promises a “privacy by design” approach, with data stored locally by default. The Essential suite already includes:
- Essential Space: capturing ideas and inspirations.
- Essential Search: internal search engine.
- Essential Memory (coming soon): a function that learns habits to remind of forgotten information at the right moment.
Carl Pei, CEO of Nothing: “With Essential, we are beginning to shake up the elitist system established by historical leaders. The future of software will be defined by collective innovation and hyper-personalization.”
Availability
- Playground is available now at playground.nothing.tech.
- Essential tools are available on Nothing smartphones and CMF (except Phone 1, which is no longer updated).
In summary: Essential is a promising experiment, an attempt to bridge software creation and daily usage. But there is still a long way to go before we can talk about an autonomous OS. For now, Nothing mainly sells a vision: that of a more personal smartphone, less constrained by the logic of traditional app stores.
