Wanna share some of my thoughts re this. I don’t wanna write a very long essay, so here are just 5 items –

1. I agree that 1 swipe down should let us alter the brightness.

2. I’m OK with no sun icon in the brightness slider. I’ll know that it’s brightness even without any icon. But some may have a hard time, so adding an icon will be more user-friendly for them.

3. Obviously Nothing didn’t wanna overuse their dot matrix design. I side with Nothing on this 1. Putting it all over the os will be 👎 for me. But beauty is subjective. Some may want the dot matrix design all over the os.

Carl Pei probably thought re the folks switching from a different Android phone or an iPhone to a Nothing phone. He probably wants the process to be as smooth as possible so the user will be satisfied. So he didn’t use the dot matrix design on the icons. He said something related to this. Changing many things fast versus changing some things gradually. He said Nothing couldn’t be overeager to alter stuff.

4. Re the phone and messages apps, I wonder whether Nothing wanted the users to use the Google apps for these or Nothing is making their own now and will release those in the future.

5. I agree that Google photos is not for everyone.

Some don’t wanna have a Google account.

Google photos is cloud-storage-focused, not local-storage-focused. Some want a local-storage-focused gallery app.

Its search doesn’t work offline. Some need a gallery app that works offline.