nothing technology

Released with Phone (3) in 2025. Essential Search lives behind the swipe-up search built into the phone. It acts as a natural entry point for users to search for anything, and receive tailored responses in the Nothing style. I worked deeply across all aspects of this project including initial ideation and prototyping, all the way through to the backend systems that keep search performing reliably to this day.

One detail I am especially proud of is the animation of our search button, based on a design reference by SingYu Lam. Android has no built-in system for complex morphing animations on this scale, so I engineered a custom system for the button to behave as designed. It ships on Google Play.

Most of my time lives in prototypes I cannot show or name. Some of them you may eventually meet in the wild as products.

Essential Apps are small, single-purpose apps and widgets that anyone can conjure with a prompt and pin straight to their phone. A gallery collects the community's creations to browse and install. The conjuring is done by a code generation agent I worked on, held in check by novel evaluation systems I created. I am especially proud of the evaluation systems, as effective evals are currently the bottleneck between passable agents and great ones.^[1][2] I also worked on the Android app itself, which ships on Google Play.

Essential Memory is a second memory for your phone. Capture what you see, hear and half-think, screenshots, voice notes, moments, and it quietly organises them into something you can come back to and ask questions of. I programmed the app integrations within Essential Space and its UI, building on the team's design.