Back in April, Carl Pei and Nothing announced that they’re working on their first smartphone, the Nothing Phone (1). It will come with their own Nothing OS ecosystem too, and you can now get a taste of how that’s like yourself as you can now download the Nothing Launcher for your own smartphone—assuming that you’re using one of the supported devices of course.
The Nothing Launcher is currently in a public beta and according to its description, you will be able to experience Android combined with Nothing’s iconic design language. It also brings with it features such as ‘Max Icons’ and ‘Max Folders’, as well as what Nothing is calling a ‘bespoke Weather and Clock’ widget. To try it out though you will need one of the following devices: Samsung Galaxy S21 series, Samsung Galaxy S22 series, Google Pixel 5 series and Google Pixel 6 series. Support for OnePlus devices will be arriving soon too.
If you do have one of those supported devices and would like to give the Nothing Launcher a chance, it’s actually a pretty simple job. Simply head over to the Google Play Store, search for the Nothing Launcher (Beta) and hit install. Then, go into your smartphone’s Settings and head over to Apps, and then click on Default Apps. You can then change the Home app to the Nothing Launcher.
We’ve given it a try ourselves on a Samsung Galaxy S21 FE and honestly… it seems like there’s quite literally nothing much to it. For starters, that monochrome wallpaper it comes with is hilariously bad for trying to look at the status bar. You can change it of course, but that just takes you to the default wallpaper selection tool. There’s also not much changes to the app drawer, with a plain grey background when you open it up. The clock and oversized app icons are kinda cool but, again, they just seem a little gimmicky for now.
This is still just a beta of course, likely for Nothing to check on stability and compatibility. Nevertheless, we certainly hope that by the time the full Nothing OS debuts with the Nothing Phone (1) that there’ll be more to their Android skin than just this.
