One of the places AI has really made an impact is on app coding, opening new doors both for professionals and the casual user. “Vibe coding,” as it’s come to be known, is exactly what you can do with Nothing’s new “Essential Apps,” which lets you create homescreen widgets, “apps,” using text prompts and the help of AI – but I’m not fully sold just yet.
First previewed back in September, “Essential Apps” are the first step towards Nothing’s “Essential OS” goal, which it views as the future of the smartphone.
As of today, that first step is hitting beta. Nothing has launched “Essential Apps” in beta with access “expanding gradually through a waitlist” that will land in batches. A full release will apparently come sometime later this year.
“Apps” is a bit of a misnomer, though, as Nothing is letting users create homescreen widgets rather than any proper apps. All functionality is limited to the widget itself, with no ability to launch into a full app as you’d get with most widgets. That’s not to say you can’t do some neat things, though.
Nothing’s “Playground” is where you’ll use AI to develop ideas, with a prompt starting the process. You simply describe what functionality you want, and it goes from there. Nothing’s example is a widget that looks at the weather and your calendar to help you find the best days & times to get in a run, with the prompt also taking into consideration the length of the run.
Create apps shaped exactly around your specific needs and context.
That’s what Essential Apps are.
You describe what you need. AI builds it. It appears on your phone’s home screen, ready to use.
One billion apps for one billion people.
Beta starts today on Nothing Playground. pic.twitter.com/tgqi0aq64r
— Essential (@essential) February 10, 2026
Nothing says that users should think of Essential Apps as making your homescreen more purposeful.
Instead of opening apps and navigating menus, small personal apps stay visible, update in place, and respond to your context. Your home screen becomes more purposeful. Your phone feels like it’s actually yours.
It’s a great idea in theory, but it’s still a bit rough around the edges.
Given some recent snowfall in my area and my continued obsession with going outside to play disc golf, one of the ideas that popped to mind for this was a widget that could show me how dry the ground might be – constantly cleaning mud really takes the fun away. So I fed a prompt into Nothing Playground and it came back with some nice suggestions, such as showing a “trend” in the soil drying, and spit out a widget that’s actually pretty close to what I had in mind, showing a basic percentage and other glanceable data. It needed some tweaks, such as asking for the temperature to be shown in Fahrenheit and resizing the widget to actually fit the 2×2 grid, the latter of which never really worked properly. The UI as a whole never really seems to perfectly line up between the web app (which, thankfully, works on desktop) and what you actually get to put on your homescreen.
The big problem, of course, is that I have no way to know how accurate any of this is. Because it’s just pulling data from the ether, it could be completely correct or wildly wrong.
A simpler idea was pulling the latest stories from 9to5Google and 9to5Mac on the same homescreen widget. Or at least, I thought it would be simple. The Playground refused to create a 4×2 widget, instead just sticking with a 2×2 size that simply isn’t big enough for anything like this. Some of the early builds from other users show 4×2 sizes and Nothing says it’s possible, but the Playground just wasn’t cooperating with me.
So I switched it up, instead going for a widget that only shows 9to5Google articles. It worked out better this time, but the size restrictions again make this a hard widget to get “right.” Ultimately, the only way I could get this to work was to show a single article with a brief snippet underneath, and I was pleased to see that the Playground generator was smart enough to make it a clickable link even without me asking for it to be. I would have loved to make a few more of these for 9to5Mac and our other sister sites, but it’s hard to make two of the same thing with Playground – like a snowflake, no two are the same.
Nothing rightfully admits that, in beta, a lot of apps may “feel unfinished,” and that’s the vibe I’m getting. There are some cool ideas out there – one with a surprising amount of polish is “Counter (with themes)” – but the fun with this really does come down to bringing your own ideas to life. While I don’t think Nothing has quite nailed it yet, this is a really good start. I kind of wish I could use this beyond the Nothing Phone, but it’s obvious why that’s not happening, at least for now.
What do you think?
If you have a Nothing Phone (3), you can sign up for Essential Apps through the Nothing Playground. Other Nothing devices will follow.
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