Carl Pei runs a smartphone company called Nothing. He just made a prediction that sounds crazy but might actually happen. He thinks our phones will only need one app in the future. That app would be the phone’s main system itself.
Right now, you probably have dozens of apps on your phone. You open one for maps, another for messages, and a different one for ordering food. Pei believes artificial intelligence will change all that. Your phone will just know what you want and do it for you.
“I believe that in the future, the entire phone will only have one app—and that will be the OS,” Pei said in a recent interview. “The OS will know its user well and will be optimized for that person.”
Think about it this way. Instead of opening three different apps to get a ride home from work, your phone would just ask: “Heading home? Should I get your usual Uber?” Then it books the ride, pays for it, and tells you when the car arrives. All without you touching anything.
This sounds pretty convenient, but there’s a big problem. Apple and Google make billions of dollars from their app stores. Millions of people around the world build apps and make money from them. Changing this whole system won’t be easy.
Pei knows this too. “At this point, if we said, ‘We have eliminated apps from smartphones,’ no one would buy it,” he admitted. He thinks it will take 7 to 10 years for this change to happen because people really like their apps right now.
Here’s how Pei’s future phone would work. The system would learn your daily routine, where you go, what you like, and when you do things. When you’re leaving the office, it might suggest ordering dinner from your favorite restaurant. If you’re running late for a meeting, it could reschedule other appointments automatically.
“Right now, you have to go through a step-by-step process of figuring out for yourself what you want to do, then unlocking your smartphone and going through it step by step,” Pei explained. “In the future, your phone will suggest what you want to do and then do it automatically for you.”
But this raises some serious questions about privacy. A phone that knows everything about you could be pretty scary if that information gets into the wrong hands. Pei says privacy protection would be crucial for this to work.
“We need to pay close attention to user privacy,” he stated. “We need transparency in how data is handled and clarity about whether it resides in the cloud or is stored on the device.”
Pei also took some shots at Apple, the company that many people think leads smartphone innovation. He says Apple used to inspire him when he was younger, especially with products like the first iPod and iPhone. But not anymore.
“Personally, I was very inspired by Apple when I was younger—the first iPod, the first iPhone,” Pei said. “But now the creative companies of the past have become very big and very corporate, and they’re no longer very creative.”
He’s particularly critical of Apple Intelligence, Apple’s new AI system. After a year of hype, Pei thinks it hasn’t delivered much. “Last year, they told a very big story about Apple Intelligence. Now, a year later, it’s not much more than some generated emojis,” he said.
Similar Posts
Pei started Nothing after leaving OnePlus, another phone company he helped build. Nothing is still pretty small in the phone world. The company grew 150 percent last year, but that only gives them 0.1 percent of the global smartphone market. Still, being small might actually help them try new things that bigger companies won’t risk.
Nothing’s newest phone, the Phone 3a, already has some features that hint at this future. It includes something called “Essential Space” that helps creative people organize their ideas. But Pei knows they need to move slowly and get people comfortable with changes gradually.
“We have to ship a little bit, look at the data, look at the feedback, iterate, and then ship again,” Pei explained. “We could do this quicker, but we need to bring the user with us on the journey.”
The technical challenges are huge though. Building a system that can handle everything you currently use dozens of apps for is incredibly complex. Each app today does its own thing independently. Getting them all to work together through one intelligent system would require massive coordination between different companies and services.
There’s also the question of whether people actually want this. Many folks have spent years learning their favorite apps. They like having different options and controlling exactly how they do things. Some people might not want their phone making decisions for them, even if it’s trying to help.
Pei sees AI as the key to making this work, but he’s focused on solving real problems rather than just showing off cool technology. He compares his approach to how Apple created the iPod. The iPod wasn’t about having a hard drive in a music player. It was about making it incredibly easy to listen to music anywhere.
“AI is just a new technology that enables us to create better products for users,” he said. “Our strategy is not to make big claims that AI is going to change the world and revolutionize smartphones. For us, it’s about using it to solve a consumer problem.”
Pei thinks smartphones are still the most important devices for AI development. While some companies are trying to create smart glasses or special AI devices, those markets are tiny. Smart glasses sell about 1 million units per year, and AI pins sell only about 5,000 units. Compare that to smartphones, which sell about 1 billion units annually.
Other big tech companies are already moving in similar directions, even if they’re not as bold as Pei’s vision. Google’s Android phones can now search for anything on your screen without leaving the app you’re using. Apple keeps adding more AI features to iPhones, even though Pei thinks they’re moving too slowly.
In China, there’s already an app called WeChat that combines messaging, payments, ride booking, and tons of other services into one app. Millions of people use WeChat for almost everything on their phones. This shows that people can adapt to more integrated experiences, though Pei’s idea goes much further.
Whether Pei’s prediction comes true exactly as he describes remains to be seen. Technology changes fast, but people’s habits change slowly. The economics of the app industry are also deeply entrenched, with too many people making too much money to change easily.
But the trend toward smarter, more helpful phones is definitely happening. As AI gets better at understanding what we want and when we want it, our phones will probably become more proactive helpers rather than just collections of separate tools.
Pei’s timeline of 7 to 10 years gives the industry time to work through these challenges. Whether Nothing leads this change or just influences it, the conversation about simpler, more intelligent phones has definitely started. The question isn’t really whether our phones will get smarter. It’s how smart we’ll let them become.
