When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Nothing CEO envisions a single-app smartphone while calling out Apple's declining creativity Hamid Ganji Neowin @HamidGanji_ · May 27, 2025 13:58 EDT Launched in 2020, Nothing is a newcomer to the smartphone market. Meanwhile, the novice company has gained a solid reputation over the past few years for its unconventional design and offering a perfect blend of performance, features, and price. Nothing CEO Carl Pei, who is also a former co-founder of OnePlus, has now vented his ideas about the future of the smartphone market and how smartphones will be over the next decade. In an interview with WIRED, Carl Pei envisioned a smartphone that only requires one app: the operating system. He believes operating systems would become so intelligent that they would know everything about the user. "I believe that in the future, the entire phone will only have one app—and that will be the OS. The OS will know its user well and will be optimized for that person," Pei said. Pei says the ultimate benefit of a single-app smartphone is that users would spend less time doing boring things, saving more time for valuable tasks. Pei added that the process of moving toward a single-app smartphone should be slow and calculated, and it might take seven to ten years. "At this point, if we said, "We have eliminated apps from smartphones," no one would buy it. So we have to ship a little bit, look at the data, look at the feedback, iterate, and then ship again. Gradually make suggestions over and over again. We could do this quicker, but we need to bring the user with us on the journey." The CEO also took a critical stance on Apple's current state of creativity, saying, "I was very inspired by Apple when I was younger—the first iPod, the first iPhone—that's the reason I'm in this industry." He added that these once-creative companies have now become "very big" and "very corporate," leading to a decline in their innovative spirit. He further noted that "Apple today is very different from the Apple when I was younger" and also disparaged Apple Intelligence. He described Apple's AI service as "not much more than some generated emojis" and said it has made consumers very skeptical. Tags Report a problem with article Follow @NeowinFeed