I love Nothing’s Android phones, but it’s getting harder to trust them

Since the launch of the Nothing Phone 1 in 2022, Nothing has marketed itself as “not like the other phone brands.” From product design to offbeat videos showing CEO Carl Pei reacting to reviews, the company has constantly tried to demonstrate how it stands apart from other smartphone makers.

However, Nothing has recently been involved in a photo-fakery scandal. Between this latest controversy and previous ones, it’s clear that Nothing isn’t really different from other brands. And these incidents make it harder to trust the company.

The same controversies as other brands

Just this week, it emerged that Nothing Phone 3 demo units sold in some markets showed a selection of photos apparently taken with the phone. However, these photos were actually taken with standalone cameras. That puts Nothing in an unenviable club that includes Samsung, HUAWEI, and Nokia when it comes to faking camera output.

The company didn’t deny the practice in its original statement, only saying it would update the demo unit software accordingly. Nothing co-founder Akis Evangelidis would step up with a more comprehensive explanation. He claimed that this was a mistake and that these stock photos were supposed to be placeholder images for software submitted four months ahead of launch.

My first thought was, why wouldn’t you simply use placeholder images taken with older Nothing Phones? And I wasn’t alone. In fact, Evangelidis told a follower that this used to be a standard practice at the firm before the “process broke down.”

This isn’t the only Nothing controversy we’ve seen in 2025. The company was previously criticized for comparing video stabilization from the Nothing Phone 3a Pro‘s main camera to the iPhone 16‘s ultrawide camera instead of the Apple device’s own primary shooter. Nothing said this was an accident, too, and that it had no intention to mislead consumers.

Mistakes happen (I’m certainly guilty of my fair share), and it may well be the case that Nothing didn’t intend to deceive customers with these incidents. Even if these are accidents, though, it still demonstrates that Nothing isn’t special when it comes to controversies.

These two scandals can plausibly be chalked up as accidents, but two previous events also provide ample reason to be wary of Nothing. The first incident was the Nothing Chats saga, which still irks me after all this time.

Nothing formed a partnership with Sunbird in 2023 to launch Nothing Chats, which allowed you to use iMessage on your Nothing Phone. Android Authority and other experts previously raised questions about the original Sunbird app’s viability, privacy, and usability. We also naturally raised questions about the privacy and viability of Nothing Chats at its launch, much to the company’s chagrin. After all, Nothing’s app was effectively Sunbird with a different UI. Unsurprisingly, it turned out that Nothing Chats was woefully insecure, and the company pulled it from the Play Store less than 48 hours after its release. 

This Nothing Chats saga demonstrated Nothing’s willingness to breathlessly chase trends. However, this particular pursuit was detrimental to users and their safety, and it took a chorus of security experts for the company to take action.

This isn’t the only questionable case of chasing trends. The Nothing Phone 1 supported NFTs at launch, offering a gallery that allowed users to track the prices of their NFTs. Nothing even released an NFT item of its own, dubbed Black Dot. It’s easy to complain about this inclusion in hindsight, given the collapse of NFTs in the public consciousness. But even in 2022, fans criticized the company for blatantly trying to capitalize on a phenomenon that already seemed extremely shaky. If the Nothing Phone 1 had been launched in 1995, I’m sure the company would be bragging about preprogrammed phone numbers for buying Beanie Babies. Except Beanie Babies actually exist.

These issues suggest that Nothing is embracing the “move fast and break things” philosophy that every two-bit startup lives by nowadays. It’s like the equivalent of “live, love, laugh” for tech companies.

These incidents over the years are a real shame, as I strongly feel that Nothing actually makes good devices. The Nothing Phone 3a Pro is one of the few mid-range phones with a periscope camera for great zoom capabilities. The CMF Phone range has a modular approach at a budget price, too. Even the Nothing Phone 3 is a good high-end phone in its own right (at least in the US and Europe).

It’s clear that Nothing has a great portfolio of phones for consumers, and I’d love to see these devices in more markets. But the company’s recent camera controversies, combined with previous missteps, make it harder to fully trust the manufacturer. I can maybe excuse these incidents after one or two years on the market, but it’s hard to justify them in 2025.

But if anything, these incidents reveal that despite its posturing to the contrary, Nothing isn’t really any different from its rivals.