Carl Pei says Nothing can’t build its own operating system

Two mobile operating systems currently account for nearly 100% of the worldwide smartphone market. Building one is difficult, and most phone manufacturers offer higher use of resources, especially when Android is at your fingertips. While it is a potential differentiator, these firms have largely chosen to take care of Google’s mobile operating system, customized with skins and unique features.

Huawei recently bucked this trend by releasing Harmony OS, although this was a direct results of geopolitical restrictions on the usage of American products. However, despite its vast resources, the Chinese electronics giant has faced enormous difficulties in attempting to build its own alternative to Android.

Given its propensity to shake up the market, it’s perhaps not entirely surprising that London-based Nothing was capable of build its own mobile operating system from scratch. On Wednesday at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, founder and CEO Carl Pei confirmed that the corporate is exploring what an actual Nothing operating system could seem like.

Pei praised smartphones as “our most important gateway to the people we care about and the information we need to use,” while criticizing the duopoly of Google and Apple within the industry.

“We’re figuring out how to maneuver here,” he added, “and possibly create something of our own. Some operating system.

The goal of such a move can be to expand Nothing’s influence within the industry while creating a completely recent revenue stream.

“Now you can influence the software,” Pei explained. “You can change the way people use their devices. On the business side, it is also very profitable. In some respects, being a hardware company sucks because of the supply chain, high capital expenditure, low margins, and high risk of product-market fit. In many ways, having some software revenue is much more convenient: higher margins. However, I think that the most important thing is still consumer satisfaction.”

The founder said he thinks the strategy of making a mobile operating system has turn into much easier because of the recent boom in artificial intelligence. Such technology will even go an extended approach to providing a level of customization that’s missing from existing platforms.

“If you think about the technical stack of an operating system, I don’t think we need to work on the lower parts of the stack – the drivers and how the hardware interfaces with the software and the kernel,” Pei added. “I don’t think we need to work on it, but we should work on user experience innovation because operating systems haven’t really changed in 40 years. These computers, smartphones and these devices have a lot of information about us. We do so much for them, but they don’t use any of this information to improve their experience.”

Asked whether the corporate expected to boost funds for such a project, Pei declined to comment.

“I don’t think it has to be much of an experience,” he said. This is applied artificial intelligence, it shouldn’t be the idea. We don’t build capabilities, we do not train large language models, we do not build text-to-speech or anything like that. That ship has sailed and it’s going to turn into extremely competitive. Two or three players will win big and the remainder will lose money.

Pei continues, “Whether we get funding or not, we can work on it.”

Artificial intelligence can be a crucial element of such an operating system, he explained, but it surely wouldn’t mean every thing.

“We shouldn’t call it an AI operating system,” he said. “Artificial intelligence is just a tool and ultimately it comes down to who can produce the best product, who has the best market fit and who can deliver the highest user satisfaction. Because without it, it just won’t work.”