- Carl Pei officially announced Nothing OS 3.0 during the Nothing Ear (open) livestream.
- The next version of Nothing OS will include a customizable lock screen, revamped quick settings, and a new Nothing Gallery app.
- Nothing OS 3.0 open beta starts in October, with the public release following in December.
Carl Pei and the Nothing team have been teasing the next version of Nothing OS for a couple of months now. The closed beta started just a few weeks ago. But things were kept quite hush-hush, until today. Carl Pei has finally given us the first official look at Nothing OS 3.0 during the Nothing Ear (open) launch. Let’s take a look at the announced features and the release date.
Nothing OS 3.0: New Features and Changes
As for the changes, they have further tweaked the OS, with better implementation of the N-dot font. There’s a new animation engine to power the new dot matrix effects throughout the UI. The company demonstrated this on the lock screen and the weather app.
On the topic of the lock screen, it features more customizations. You can easily switch between clock styles, or remove the clock completely and use widgets instead. There are new clock faces, especially a stretched analog clock face, which looks pretty unique and tasteful.
The quick settings have received the biggest facelift making better use of the space, you can adjust the size of the toggles similar to iOS 18. They also added a much-requested auto-brightness toggle in the brightness slider.
Then there’s the new app drawer where you can pin apps to the top to find them quicker. Smart thinking on the part of the Nothing team. If you want a more organized experience then you can switch to the Smart Drawer which automatically arranges the apps into different categories.
Carl also talked about a new countdown timer widget which can be useful to keep track of events in real time. You can now share widgets with your friends, for a shared experience. Even add stickers before sharing. Though we’re not sure whether it will only work with Nothing devices or other devices as well.
Moving on, we got our first glimpse at the new Nothing Gallery app, which will help lower the processing time by 25% faster. The app will also keep track of your key moments, recognizing them with the help of AI and cutting out the object of said moments so you can easily recognize them.
And at last, they talked about how more features like AI Upscaling and Super Resolution. This will work similarly to Pixel 9’s Zoom to Enhance feature, which uses AI to increase the details of the image when you zoom in. AI image generation is also in the works, again identical to Pixel Studio.
Nothing OS 3.0: Release Date
Before the live stream ended, Carl talked about when will we get to see these updates hit our devices. The open beta for Nothing OS 3.0 starts this October, and the public release will roll out starting December.
They did not provide us with the exact date, but my guess would be, that the beta will start as soon as Android 15 launches. The update itself is might be near completion, and they are waiting on the release of Android 15, to check for compatibility issues, and iron out any last-minute bugs before they release the update. We also spotted the Nothing Phone (3) that shows up as an Easter egg when the company was demonstrating one of the upcoming features.
Overall, it looks like it’s going to be an exciting month ahead for Nothing fans. Which one of these new features are eagerly waiting to try out? Tell us about it in the comments.
