In October, Nothing unveiled Essential Apps – AI-generated mini-apps and widgets based on signals, which will live on your device and can be shared with others through the Nothing’s Playground community platform.
Today, Nothing is announcing the rollout of the Essential Apps beta following the alpha release in late 2025, which was only available to a small group of early adopters. With the beta, access is gradually expanding through a waiting list, with users being added in batches.
Build apps sized exactly to your specific needs and context.
These are the essential apps.
You describe what you want. AI creates it. It appears ready to use on your phone’s home screen.
A billion apps for a billion people.
The beta on Nothing Playground starts today. pic.twitter.com/tgqi0aq64r
– essential (@essential) 10 February 2026
The initial beta is only available on Nothing phones (3) “because it has the performance to launch many essential apps” while Nothing refines the system. In the future, the beta will also be available on other Nothing and CMF devices running Nothing OS 4.0 and above.
Right now, Essential Apps fully supports three permissions: Location, Calendar (read-only), and Contacts. So you can create things like location-based reminders, agenda views, meeting countdowns, and one-tap contact widgets. More capabilities are promised for the future, including camera and microphone access, network fetching, notifications, vibration, calling, and Bluetooth.
There’s nothing to say whether the OS update coming in late February will unlock activity detection, usage statistics, sensor data, and its first System Weather API. To use Essential Apps, you simply explain in clear language what you want (within the constraints mentioned above) and the AI-powered Apps Builder will create it. When you edit something, only those specific parts are updated, and your app remains stable and will become more reliable over time.
Essential apps will “move forward to public release later this year”, nothing says, “once system integration is stable and device compatibility is confirmed”. Throughout the beta phase, the platform will continue to “achieve deeper system integration, expanded design capabilities, and broader device support.”
Nothing Phone (3) 5G
| 256GB 12GB RAM | ₹ 45,490 |
$639.00 |
| 512GB 16GB RAM | ₹ 54,850 |
$711.92 |
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