Nothing has finally given its phones a truly essential feature

When I was in middle school, I was enamored with the idea of making my own video game. Through the rudimentary nature of the AOL-era internet, I learned Visual Basic and proceeded to make very basic games. That was enough of a spark to get me to try my hand at harder coding languages, but I quickly realized I was in over my head. Years later, I'd try my hand at it again in college, only to realize that programming just wasn't my thing.

Fast forward 20 years, and companies like Nothing are helping people like me realize my dreams in a way I'm not sure I ever expected: by having the computer write the code for me. This week, Nothing launched Essential Apps, something the company pens as a fresh concept for a new smartphone era, one that's not run entirely by siloed apps in a walled garden.

Instead, apps made in Playground (access it here) — the builder tool for Essential Apps — live on your home screen just like a classic widget. While we could debate the idea that this is or isn't actually a new concept, I'd rather focus on how well Nothing Playground and the Essential Apps it makes work, and the first 20 minutes I spent with it have given me a very clear understanding of that.

From can't code to no code

I haven't written a line of code since the last website I designed in the mid-2000s. At least, not that I can remember, anyway. But Essential Apps has made me feel like that doesn't matter at all. All I needed was a vision for a micro app and a few lines of text. Surely a writer can do that, right?

It only took me five revisions to make the widget I wanted, and I love that. In a nutshell, I wanted a small widget that could count my reps and weight at the gym, including the name of the exercise, and then export that to another program. I'm basically a neanderthal when it comes to recording my PRs at the gym and storing everything in Google Keep.

While there certainly are better programs for this, I just wanted something dead simple, and that's what I made with Essential Apps.

The builder UI couldn't be simpler, but I've never used a "vibe coding" platform before, so I can't directly compare it with building in ChatGPT or Claude, but I'm certainly of the mind that I want to try those platforms out after this.

Several times throughout the process of building the Essential App widget, Playground asked me to clarify a few steps. Things like "Should weight be recorded per set, or just once per exercise session?" were things I didn't initially consider asking the program to do.

It not only felt unbelievably smart — this thing clearly understands nuance and context — but it also saved me from having to ask it to make that change in a further revision of the app.

It was also impressively easy to move forward and backward between versions if I didn't like where things were headed or I just wanted it to branch off an idea from a previous version. While I didn't create any graphics for this widget, it also included an option to upload any imagery you want and add that to the widget, and you can also decide if you want a large or small widget.

Once you're done, deploying the app to your phone's home screen is a single click. Essential Apps are found in a dedicated section of the app drawer so that they don't get lost with traditional widgets. Once you've tested it and want further feedback from the community, you can publish it to the Essential Apps gallery so other Nothing Phone 3 users can try it out.

Will this replace normal apps?

In a LinkedIn post, Nothing's CEO, Carl Pei, declared that Essential Apps would be "free from walled gardens" of current app stores, separating Nothing's new move from apps "built by a handful of companies, for billions of people at once."

"Software should be tailored to your specific needs and context," Pei noted. "From a simple prompt, you create personalized apps. No ads. No dark patterns. No one-size-fits-all." It certainly sounds ideal, but as the top reply on the post notes, this angle isn't the first time we've seen this kind of language.

"I’ve seen this pattern every time 'personalization' gets declared the next frontier," Shivam Chand Srivastava said in a reply to Pei's post. "Open ecosystems start idealistic. What’s uncomfortable is that defaults return because most people prefer convenience over control. Choice feels empowering until maintenance becomes work."

The "danger" of Essential Apps is that users might be attracted to the idea at first, but eventually stop making or using them in favor of more centralized or popular apps. My workout app is a perfect example of this: it might solve a problem I have right now, but I can see myself eventually tiring of manually exporting the data after logging it in the app.

A service like Strava can be connected to one of the many popular apps from companies like Nike on the Play Store, and then we're right back to square one in the walled garden, as Pei defines it.

Even if this doesn't redefine apps as we know them, Nothing's implementation of the concept is solid, and I can see the company growing it substantially from here. That, alone, is a victory in and of itself, especially since Nothing can shift it to a must-have feature on every Nothing Phone in the near future.