It’s Nothing
In the last decade, I never thought about Android. All I knew was that it was kinda immature, not well thought through, and the ecosystem was in a state of constant chaos with disorganized pieces that sometimes worked well together and sometimes not.
Then I noticed some marketing bits from Nothing.tech that looked like there was finally some company taking care of at least some of those issues. It made me try LineageOS on my wife's old Xiaomi phone to do something like a trial run and get a feel for how it works on the other side of the river.
This whole thing happened while I was slowly breaking out of the Apple ecosystem.
First, I moved from Apple Watch to Garmin Instinct X (which is also a much better fit when you spend some of your time on firefighting activities—it has a torch and runs 30 days without charging).
Then I started to live with Jottacloud, Keepass, Linux for Desktop, and eventually, once I moved all my family photo library to Google, I thought, hey, there's nothing really holding me back from using Android as my primary mobile OS now, except for the lack of NFC payments on LineageOS. Also, Gemini is WAY better than Siri, even on that crappy old phone running LineageOS.
So I tried Nothing.
How it's going
Last Thursday, I finally snapped and went to Media Markt. Bought that shiny Nothing Phone 3A for 279€. When I told this to my friend, she said, „you mean a 24-month contract, right?“
Nope, that's the gross amount.
I honestly thought about the Pixel 9A due to its size and some Gemini exclusives, but once I realized this thing DOES NOT make HDR photos, I immediately decided on the Nothing 3A.
Hardware
Except for the camera, this thing is better than the iPhone 16. Period.
Yes, it has a plastic frame (don't care), but that's the only thing that's visibly worse. Plus maybe that it's bigger than the iPhone 16 and for me just slightly too big to use comfortably with one hand.
The screen is better than the iPhone's. I got used to the 120Hz display very fast, and now 60Hz on the iPhone feels kinda weird.
Battery?
On my iPhone 16 with 100% battery capacity, I tend to end my days with about 20% battery left. On the Nothing Phone 3A, I end my days with about 50% or more. Nothing more to say.
Camera
The camera is slightly worse than on the iPhone. It's not that prominent while shooting photos, but when doing videos. The biggest drawback is that NothingOS does not support HDR video recording. Big minus.
Performance
Both are comparable. I don't feel any differences except when editing videos for Instagram. This is way slower on the Nothing Phone. Cropping a video on an iPhone takes seconds, while on Nothing it takes forever (a minute or more).
Software
Nothing stuff
Well, to be honest, I'm not that hyped about Nothing's design. Yes, it looks amazing at first, but I had to disable most of those design bits like the Nothing icon pack because the icons are just too small for being black on white, and I can't see what's what like I can with default app icons.
Widgets are meh. I miss a nice calendar widget. Google's one is too clunky, and Nothing has no calendar widget. The nicest one is from Outlook, so I use this even though I actually prefer using Google Calendar to manage my events.
Notifications suck
It took me some time to figure out why I hate Android notifications. Now I know. This thing groups notifications (nice) and sorts those groups by some cryptic priority.
With that, I often see I get some notification, want to read it, swipe down, and I can't find it because it's somewhere in the 2nd or 3rd group from the top. Totally crazy.
The worst is that there's literally no way to change it. Plus for iOS, which here, as well as other places, is more customizable (!).
Android is great for polyglots and multiregionals
Apple assumes nobody leaves their countries and lives mainly abroad while still having some relation to their home country.
When you move to another country, you want to download region-specific apps that are only available in that region. But Apple says "lol, migrate or make a new App Store account."
So if you, let's say, need to have German banking apps while also having Polish ones plus Polish government apps, have fun with the Apple ID shuffling dance every once in a while.
Android here doesn't care. I don't know how it works exactly, but Play Store just gives me options to download all the German and Polish apps without any hassle, from the same Google account.
Big, huge plus for Android.
The same happens in a multi-language situation.
I use 3 languages on a daily basis: Polish, English, and German. Apple claims they have a super-smart keyboard that predicts the language on an app basis and switches properly. That's bullshit. They don't.
Also, switching languages on iOS is a nightmare. It always switches to the wrong one, and then you need to eventually open that menu and find the language you want. Usually, you figure out that the keyboard is misconfigured far too late, when you already typed a lot of words and everything is red while suggestions go mad.
On Android, you just set up your keyboard to use all three languages at once. And it recognizes what you write and switches suggestions accordingly.
"It just works!"
Gemini is dope
For a long time, I didn't use cloud-based LLMs because I didn't trust them too much, and apart from Google replacement, I never found good use cases to make them usable.
That's not the case for Gemini, which slowly replaces some of the apps I used to use heavily before.
For example, I don't use LanguageTool anymore. I made a chat where I told Gemini that in this chat it should only check my German writing to find mistakes, and it does exactly that.
Same for PONS. I made a chat where I told the agent that here it should translate Polish words, with examples and conjugations plus Duden-like German definitions, and it does exactly that without any issues.
I make more and more pinned chats like this, and I catch myself using them every day.
At the same time, Siri is still best at telling what it can't do, like:
- "Hey Siri, read my last messages" (while in the car) - "Oh sorry, can't do that, you need to do it on your iPhone."
- vs: "Hey Google, read my last messages" - "Sure, here are your last messages: …"
Another topic is, again, the multi-language situation. Gemini switches from German to Polish without any issues. That includes Gemini Live, where I do some live chats with it.
- Hey Google, wie wird das Wetter morgen?
- Morgen….
- Ok, dodaj wydarzenie na jutro o 18:00 w kalendarzu Family o treści: …
- Dodaję wydarzenie do kalendarza Family…
I just can't believe Apple can't even be close to that usability level. If they can't, it might mean they are about to experience the Nokia situation very soon.
Meta apps
I don't know why, but all Meta apps are bad on Android compared to iOS. Like literally, there are missing features like no option to crop a video before sending it to Instagram. Plus major bugs like sharing a picture from one Messenger group to another is nearly impossible. Tapping on the "share" button does nothing for like a minute. Tapping it more (no feedback) results in multiple share windows stacked after that minute. Wahnsinn.
Good thing I only use those now to brag about stuff I do (rarely) and check some stuff on Facebook when someone shares it with me.
All the messaging is done in the Element app, which is a Matrix client, so I don't care about Meta apps that much.
Keepass
No Android Keepass client supports passkeys. This was a major surprise and a blocker for me. On iOS and macOS, I use Strongbox. On Linux, KeepassXC. Both support passkeys, and I already configured it for many of my accounts.
Now I'm locked out of this and need to always fall back to 2FA, which is a bummer.
Additionally, third-party password manager integration on Android is a hit-or-miss. Sometimes it just works, sometimes it's hidden behind a feature flag (Chrome), sometimes it works most of the time (Firefox).
Sometimes it works on the first login stage (email) while forgetting to kick in on the second one (password).
Not a showstopper, just an annoyance, and I hope it will improve with time.
Airdrop, ekhem, Nearby Share
Airdrop is amazing. Airdrop is Apple-only. You can't Airdrop to Linux (yet).
Since I moved to Android, I started using Nearby Share. And it works EVERYWHERE. I can send files from Android to Linux, from Linux to iOS. All goes.
With that in mind, I agree with the EU commission (or whoever that was) that forces Apple to stop being that guy and start doing what everyone is doing: be compatible.
Overall feeling
Having all the cons and pros in mind, I think that Android is a great OS for a superuser.
If you know how to navigate the feature flags and some hidden system settings, this can be a very good OS where you feel like it's fun to operate while keeping a decent overall quality.
I will, however, still recommend iOS for anyone else, and I will keep my entire family on iOS just because in the "random user" scenario, this is just a much better-designed system where defaults are top-notch in terms of privacy, security, and comfort, and you just can't make something stupid there (like using a default browser, Chrome, that tracks you across the entire internet via Google Analytics, which is literally blocked by any other browser by default).
My next phone will be Nothing or Pixel.