Those who are patiently waiting for Nothing’s first smartphone can now test the Nothing Launcher. As promised, this launcher features some of the unique design language (mainly fonts and widgets) of the upcoming “Nothing OS.”
Unfortunately, the Nothing Launcher is still in Beta and is only supported by a handful of phones. It also feels very incomplete, like a modest reskin of the stock Android launcher. The only noticeable difference, aside from the widgets and certifiably ugly wallpaper, are the menu fonts (which have the same dot-matrix look of Nothing’s promotional material).
There’s just one notable feature here. Nothing Launcher lets you enlarge the icons for individual apps on your home screen. So, if you’ve ever wanted the Twitter app icon to take up a quarter of your screen, this is the launcher for you.
Nothing’s oddly-named Phone (1) should go on sale sometime this summer. According to founder Carl Pei, the Nothing OS “captures the best features of pure Android, distilling the operating system to just the essentials.” It sounds suspiciously similar to the Oxygen OS that OnePlus uses in its devices—Carl Pei co-founded OnePlus, by the way.
Select devices, including the Galaxy S22, can install the Nothing Launcher Beta from the Google Play Store. Oh, and Nothing sent us a Dropbox folder of extra wallpapers and ringtones (made by Teenage Engineering)—feel free to download these assets for your phone.
