After a week vibe coding apps using Nothing’s Essential Apps Builder, I’m conflicted. I buy into the smartphone maker’s vision for software that adapts to you, not the other way around, but right now it doesn’t deliver. It’s hard to see how this goes from cool novelty to a reliable tool without serious refinement, and a level of consumer patience it may struggle to find.
Nothing laid out its pitch for an “AI-native operating system” last year: something that would sit at the heart of its devices and make them feel more personal and more adaptable. While it’s not really an operating system — it’s more of an AI layer draped over the top of Android — it’s the backdrop for Essential, which CEO Carl Pei told The Verge is the company’s umbrella “name for all our AI-related products.” And within that umbrella are Essential Apps, small, AI-designed widgets that live on your home screen. Given that limitation, “Essential Widgets” would probably be a more honest name.
Those apps are built in Apps Builder inside Playground, Nothing’s take on an app store. The pitch is disarmingly simple: describe what you want in plain language, Builder makes it, and you push it to your phone. There’s no setup and no need to know how to code, though I’m sure it wouldn’t hurt. Builder will sometimes ask clarifying questions and if its first attempt isn’t to your liking (it usually isn’t), you can iterate instead of starting from scratch.
Building widgets you’d want to keep on your homescreen is another matter. I’ll admit, I don’t really use widgets in the first place, so I’m a tough sell, but even judging it on its own terms, I immediately notice how stark of a gap there is between “it works” and “I’d use this.”
Starting simple, I asked Builder for a water-tracking widget to reward me with a smiley face if I drink eight glasses. The result wasn’t pretty, but it worked. A widget showing upcoming appointments for the day, drawn from my connected Google Calendar, was also rather painless to make and functional from the first try. I then moved on to a tiny yellow mood widget that served up a different smile emoji every time I unlocked my phone, which I later edited to blue. Updates were easy, just tweak in Builder and push it to my phone. If I wanted to roll things back, everything was stored and neatly organized in project folders in Playground.
Not everything was smooth, though, and making more ambitious widgets was a messier process. A shopping list highlighted the limits of shoving the functionality of an app into a widget-sized space, showing only one of the items I’d written down. I noticed that many of my widgets would cut off bits of text in places. Location was also tricky. A weather widget meant to use my location instead used the four London locations I’d given to Builder as an example, showing me all four forecasts on one interface.
An ugly Pomodoro timer was worse: it stopped counting down the moment my phone locked, which defeats the point of setting it and coming back later. I tried to troubleshoot, but nothing stuck. Even a simple photo widget, that pulled images from the camera roll, didn’t work at all, and Builder’s “fix with AI” button didn’t help either.
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On reflection, I feel there are two key issues stopping me from truly embracing Nothing’s vision of an ever-evolving ecosystem of vibe coding apps. The first is the natural result of using a product in early beta. Builder is limited to Nothing’s Phone (3), only supports 2×2 and 4×2 widget sizes, and only fully supports connections to location, contacts, and calendar.
In the future, Nothing says apps will fully support a much wider range of functionality, including fetching data from the internet, media library and camera access, and access to Bluetooth devices. Additional widget sizes are planned around late March, including compact 1×2 layouts and larger 4×4 ones. More devices will also be supported and a public launch will open up a much wider variety of user-created apps, part of a new creator ecosystem the company hopes to nurture and would let you “remix” other people’s apps. It’s not clear when this will happen; Nothing says “public release will follow once system integrations are stable, permission handling is reliable and compatibility across devices is confirmed.”
The second issue is a potentially fatal hurdle for a project like this: me. I’ve been reporting on AI tools for years, and one pattern keeps repeating—no matter how capable a system is, the hardest part is knowing how to use it to its potential. I immediately ran into that using Nothing’s Essential App Builder. It seems very capable and has great potential, but I didn’t always know what I wanted, and when I did, I didn’t always know how to ask for it. An ecosystem built on vibes is a great idea, but sometimes vibes aren’t enough.