Will an app into existence, and Nothing shall let you do it. With some help from AI.
Earlier this year, Nothing wowed us with an app called Essential Space, an app that serves somewhat like a digital memory bank and makes generous use of AI. Today, the company is pushing the vision further with Essential, a full-fledged AI platform where users can create and share apps that are created simply by describing them.
The big shift
Think of Essential as a digital playground. Here, you can share everything from AI-generated mobile apps to camera filters and sound equalizer profiles. Vibe coding, for mobile, on mobile, if I may put it that way. At the center of it all is the new Essential Apps for Nothing smartphones.
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All you have to do, in order to create a hyper-specific and deeply personal app, is say it in natural language. Think of it like talking with a chatbot. For example, you can create apps by simply describing their premise as follows:
“Scan business cards from the gallery and make a searchable directory, updating every week.”
“After meetings, email me action items extracted from my calendar and recent notes.”
“Build a daily photo diary from my camera roll, organising images by mood and tagging locations.”
These apps are ready to deploy without any technical hassles. As soon as the app is created, you can directly add it to the home screen and begin using it. The premise is too different from custom GPTs for ChatGPT, Gems created using Gemini, Skills in the AI-powered Dia browser, or Shortcuts in Perplexity’s Comet browser.
The hot premise
Nothing is giving users an unprecedented level of flexibility over their mobile experiences. Instead of creating obscure shortcuts, they can now simply create apps for each task. But most importantly, they can openly share these apps within the community.
This is nothing short of opening the creative floodgates for mobile users. Aside from sharing apps, users can also download and iterate on those created by others. The whole process of creating apps is tied to the Playground, a dedicated space with its AI-powered development toolkit.
Playground is widely available for all Nothing smartphone users, and there are already plenty of apps created by the community, including one from the company’s founding chief, Carl Pei. At the moment, the Playground repository has user-generated apps that handle everything from shadowing a visual moon crescent progress and curating news to tracking water intake.