Nothing OS 3.0 just got previewed with a bunch of interesting new features

If you’re a fan of the Nothing Phone, we’ve got some good news: Nothing has just offered up a preview of the Nothing OS 3.0 software update coming to its devices this October, and there’s a whole slate of intriguing new features contained within it.

In a video on the company’s YouTube channel, Nothing’s Software Product Design Lead Yuri Levin describes Nothing OS 3.0 as “the OS we always wanted to make.” It took three years of development, Levin explains, but comes with a raft of features designed to improve the user experience.

That includes the Nothing Gallery, which is a new photo app that grants you faster access from the camera app and is made using Nothing’s own design language. There are new widgets for date countdowns, ‘Shared Widgets’ that can sync content among different users, plus more widget customization options (including the ability to remove the large clock from your lock screen in order to make room for more widgets).

Elsewhere, the user interface has been revamped with updated typography and a fresh ‘Dot Engine’ that adds new dot-based animations to elements like the device’s fingerprint reader. The Quick Settings screen has also been redesigned to give you full icon customization (including changing their size), as well as an auto brightness setting that has been added to the Quick Settings’ brightness slider.

Finally, the app drawer has had an infusion of artificial intelligence (AI). This means it automatically sorts apps into categories to help you locate them quickly, and it can also suggest apps that you might want to use next based on what it learns from your behavior. Alternatively, you can also manually pin apps to the app drawer if you want to find them more easily and regularly come back to them.

According to 9to5Google, Nothing OS 3.0 is “almost certainly” based on Android 15, which is set to be released on all the best Android phones this October. That lines up with the Nothing OS 3.0 beta launch date, which is pegged for the same month. Nothing 3.0’s full rollout is expected to arrive around December, so keep your eyes peeled for further updates as we get closer to the general release date.

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Alex Blake has been fooling around with computers since the early 1990s, and since that time he’s learned a thing or two about tech. No more than two things, though. That’s all his brain can hold. As well as TechRadar, Alex writes for iMore, Digital Trends and Creative Bloq, among others. He was previously commissioning editor at MacFormat magazine. That means he mostly covers the world of Apple and its latest products, but also Windows, computer peripherals, mobile apps, and much more beyond. When not writing, you can find him hiking the English countryside and gaming on his PC.