The Headphone (1) carries a full parametric equalizer in its firmware. Eight bands, real Q control, all of it. What the app hands you is that same engine with the frequency ranges fenced off, each band pinned near its own zone so a genuine PEQ ends up behaving like a fixed-band graphic EQ in costume. A reviewer over on Head-Fi decoded the hardware, built his own autoEQ against it, and demonstrated the ceiling is a software decision rather than a silicon limit. That single detail explains more about Nothing X than any feature list will, so I pulled the whole thing apart: the history, the protocol it speaks, the feature tiering nobody documents, the bug reports, the privacy posture, and the community that rebuilt the app because Nothing shipped a desktop version.

What Nothing X actually is in 2026

It is not an earbuds app anymore. Nothing describes it as an all-in-one smart device manager, and since July 2025 that has meant earbuds, headphones and CMF smartwatches sharing one shell, with health and fitness tracking folded in alongside the EQ curves.

DeveloperNothing Technology Limited, Bedford House, 21A John Street, London WC1N 2BF
Android packagecom.nothing.smartcenter
iOS App Store ID1568033706
CategoryTools on Play, Utilities on the App Store
Play rating4.5 stars, 65,300 reviews
Play installs10 million and up
App Store rating4.7 stars, 2,900 ratings
App Store chart#191 Utilities, US
iOS build size393.7 MB
Latest iOS version3.5.13, 15 June 2026
Android last updated11 June 2026
Minimum iOS13.0, also visionOS 1.0
LocalisationEnglish plus 46 languages
Age rating3+ on Play, 9+ on the App Store for health topics
PriceFree, with an emerging paid transcription tier

Two details in there are worth pausing on. The App Store listing still carries a 2022 copyright line. And the Play changelog entry reads, in full, “bug fixes and improvements”. Nothing has effectively stopped writing public release notes, which is its own recurring complaint in the community and something I come back to near the end of this.

From Ear (1) companion app to whatever this is now

It began as the Ear (1) Companion App, shipped alongside Nothing’s first product in July 2021. Pairing gave you gesture customization, EQ settings and a find-my-buds function. Early builds hid easter eggs, including a way to customise the case light and a prototype “Ear (0)” display that never existed as hardware.

The rename landed in November 2022, announced at the Ear (stick) launch. Having a product called Ear (1) and an app called Ear (1) was becoming untenable, so the app became Nothing X. The same update improved pairing and setup, refreshed the interface, reworked gesture controls, and introduced Low Lag mode for gaming. It also established the Nothing OS integration pattern that still holds: on Nothing OS 1.1.4 or higher every setting lives under Device Details in the Bluetooth menu, and the standalone app, even when installed, does not appear in the app drawer at all.

Version 2.x tracked hardware. Ear (2) support arrived in 2.2.0, CMF Buds Pro in 2.3.8. This is the stretch where the parametric EQ and the Personal Sound profile matured into the features the app is now known for.

Then came 22 July 2025 and version 3.4.0, which is the pivot everything since has been shaped by. Nothing X absorbed every CMF smartwatch, Watch Pro through Watch 3 Pro, and Nothing framed it as ecosystem strategy: a step toward a single platform connecting all devices. The release notes promised a full redesign, better connectivity and stability, improved GPS accuracy, visual alignment with Nothing OS, and more frequent feature updates through the year. Two of those five held up.

The release history, reconstructed

VersionDateContent
3.2.228 Apr 2025Buds 2 Plus and Buds 2a support
3.2.3 to 3.2.5May to Jun 2025Stability
3.3.0 / 3.3.12 to 8 Jul 2025Headphone (1) support
3.4.022 Jul 2025Watch 3 Pro, Headphone (1), the redesign
3.4.124 Jul 2025Emergency post-redesign fixes
3.4.3 to 3.4.5Aug to Sep 2025Fixes
3.4.618 Sep 2025Ear (3) support
3.4.1029 Sep 2025Watch 3 Pro, CMF Headphone Pro, EQ Library
3.4.1224 Oct 2025Super Mic Natural Mode, Personal Sound for Headphone (1)
3.4.13 to 3.4.18Oct 2025 to Jan 2026Fixes
3.5.05 Mar 2026Headphone (a) support
3.5.1 to 3.5.3Mar to Apr 2026Fixes
3.5.10 to 3.5.13Jun 2026Fixes

Read that column on the right and the pattern is hard to miss. Hardware support lands, then months of unlabelled maintenance. Between October 2025 and June 2026 there is exactly one release carrying a feature against nine that carry nothing you can name.

The CMF Watch shutdown

The merger that started in July 2025 finished on 19 July 2026, when the standalone CMF Watch app stopped being able to pair CMF watches at all. It was delisted from both stores on 3 April and gets pulled from Play entirely by the end of the year. Workout records, daily activity, sleep, heart rate, blood oxygen, stress, fitness goals, plus active score and training load on a Watch Pro 2, all migrate across. Nickname, avatar, height, weight, female health data and any custom watch face you built do not. Starting the migration permanently deactivates your old account with no way back in. I have written about that separately because it deserves the room, so I am keeping it short here.

How it actually talks to your earbuds

Nothing audio devices speak Bluetooth Classic RFCOMM on channel 15, with packets prefixed 0x55 and a frame format shared across the whole Ear line. None of that came from Nothing. It was reverse-engineered by Bharadwaj Raju, who published the process, and who found the existing Windows tool useless as a reference because its Bluetooth communication code was kept private for stated user-security reasons. He also tried decompiling the Android app first and abandoned it, since the generated Smali and the decompiled Java were both unreadable.

The architectural point that matters most, and the one almost nobody mentions, is where your settings live. EQ profiles are stored on the headphones, not the phone. Your tuning follows the hardware onto any device you pair it with, which is why the community tools work at all: Nothing X is a configuration client, not a runtime audio processor. It writes a value and walks away.

That is also what makes the PEQ restriction from the opening so irritating. The firmware exposes the full thing. The app chooses not to.

Which devices it covers, and the tiering nobody publishes

By mid-2026, the app essentially spans the entire Nothing and CMF portfolio outside the phones. On the Nothing side, that is Ear (1), Ear (stick), Ear (2), Ear (2024), Ear (a), Ear (open), Ear (3) and Ear (3a), plus Headphone (1) and Headphone (a). On the CMF side, Buds, Buds Pro, Buds Pro 2, Buds 2, Buds 2a, Buds 2 Plus, Neckband Pro, Headphone Pro, and the Watch Pro, Watch Pro 2 and Watch 3 Pro.

The thing buyers keep getting caught by is that feature availability is heavily tiered, and Nothing publishes no matrix for it anywhere. The advanced parametric EQ and Personal Sound are not universal. On the Ear (a), you get a simple three-band EQ, five levels of Bass Enhance, ANC strength, in-ear detection and low-latency mode, and that is the lot: no advanced equalizer, no hearing test, no spatial audio. Features also get removed between generations, and Nothing runs a support article explaining why Bass Enhancement was dropped on the Ear (3a). If you are buying on the strength of the app rather than the hardware, check which tier your model sits in first, because you will not find that out from the product page.

Everything the app does

Noise control

ANC with multiple strength levels, device-dependent and reaching 45 to 48 dB hybrid on recent models, plus transparency mode, adaptive ANC on the Headphone (1) and (a), and off.

The equalizer, which is the whole reason to care

Three tiers sit behind three tabs. Simple gives you Balanced, More Bass, More Treble and Voice, plus custom curves built on a graphic visualizer. Advanced is the eight-band parametric tab, adjusting frequency and Q per band at plus or minus 6dB, with a separate five-level bass enhancer sitting outside the main EQ so you can add low end without spending bands on it. On the Ear (open) it behaves as a true parametric equaliser across the entire range, where a slider nominally at 400Hz can be dragged as far as 999Hz.

Explore arrived in October 2025 and is the EQ Library: curated profiles from artists, audiophiles, creators and community members, each carrying a description and a full breakdown of its frequency, volume and Q Factor configuration, importable straight into the Advanced tab for further fiddling. You upload your own through the Nothing Playground site for a shot at being featured.

Sharing works by QR code, which remains the single smartest thing in the app. Generate a code, someone scans it, they have your exact curve. SoundGuys holds this up as what the whole category should be doing, and having used Sony’s and Sennheiser’s alternatives, I agree without reservation.

Personal Sound

A hearing test that measures how well you hear high frequencies and adjusts output accordingly, built with Mimi Hearing, whose hearing test app is certified for medical devices. It reached the Headphone (1) in October 2025. Reviewer opinion splits on it, one preferring it enabled and another preferring the default tuning, which matches my own experience that it helps on some material and flattens others.

Bass, spatial audio and codecs

Bass Enhance runs five levels, dynamically amplifying low frequencies in real time, and gets marketed as Ultra Bass on the Headphone (1), Headphone (a) and recent CMF buds. Spatial audio offers head-tracking, fixed and off on the Headphone (1), with sensors reading head movement in real time so the sound stays anchored where it was when you turn. The Headphone (a) adds static spatial presets drawn from live concerts and cinematic mixes. One reviewer dismissed the modes as dialing up reverb and not worth touching, which is harsh but not wrong on most material.

Codecs run through a High-quality audio setting: enable it in Device Settings, then pick LDAC in Android’s Bluetooth settings or Developer options. The trade-off gets missed constantly, so it is worth stating plainly. Turning LDAC on disables the equalizer. You get higher resolution at Nothing’s default tuning and nothing else, which for anyone who bought in for the EQ is a real decision rather than a free upgrade.

Latency, fit, controls, connections

Low Lag drops latency below 120ms, though only when paired with a Nothing Phone in Game Mode, which is the first of several places the ecosystem lock shows up. Fit gets an ear tip test for seal verification, in-ear and over-ear detection for auto pause and play, off by default on the Headphone (1) and needing enabling, and channel balance controls referenced in the support docs.

Controls are remappable across pinch, tap, roller and paddle inputs, assigning play and pause, skip forward and back, noise mode switching, volume, and voice assistant wake. On the Headphone (1) and (a), the roller and paddle can also carry spatial audio, mic mute, and EQ preset switching. Connectivity covers Google Fast Pair, Microsoft Swift Pair, and Dual Connection for two simultaneous hosts, which auto-switches based on whichever source is playing audio or on a call. Worth knowing that Dual Connection is Nothing’s own implementation rather than standard Bluetooth multipoint: the CMF Buds Pro 2 have no multipoint; they have this.

Maintenance is the boring part that matters. The app is the only sanctioned route for earbud and headphone firmware, with updates running anywhere from about 75 seconds on CMF Buds Pro 2 to roughly three minutes on the Ear (a). You also get Find My Earbuds playing a locating tone, battery levels for buds and case, and factory reset.

AI, voice and the recording suite

ChatGPT triggers on pinch-and-hold once you set it as voice assistant under Controls. It rolled out from 21 May 2024 to the Ear (1), Ear (stick), Ear (2), CMF Buds, CMF Neckband Pro and CMF Buds Pro. The caveat is the important bit: it requires a Nothing phone. Pair the identical earbuds to a Pixel and the feature is simply gone. There is a separate support article for why it does not work on the CMF Headphone Pro at all.

Essential Space handles the handoff on newer hardware. Pressing the button on the Headphone (a) drops thoughts and to-dos straight into it and transcribes them automatically, and Nothing OS users get Super Mic recordings from the Ear (3) syncing and transcribing there too.

Super Mic itself puts dual microphones in the Ear (3) charging case, activated by a Talk button, using beamforming to isolate your voice from background noise up to 95 dB. It works with native voice memo apps and some third-party video apps but not with in-app messaging like WhatsApp, which limits it more than the marketing suggests. In October 2025, it added a Natural Mode that preserves more detail.

The Ear (3a) took a different route this month by putting the storage in the buds: 16MB per earbud, 32MB total. Audio Snapshot captures up to 60 seconds of whatever is playing when you pinch, configurable in 15-second steps, with up to 30 seconds grabbed before the trigger and 30 after, and adjustable capture quality. Call Recording holds up to two hours per recording. Files transfer to Nothing X automatically on connection, and everyone on the call hears a privacy notification when recording starts.

Transcription runs three models. Two are free and run on device, one prioritizing speed and the other accuracy. The third is Pro, cloud-processed, adding summaries, topic tracking and speaker identification. Independent testing found the difference is real rather than marketing: only the Pro model correctly transcribed a difficult proper noun, though the offline models handle ordinary speech fine.

Wearables and the account layer

Since July 2025, the app also does sleep, heart rate and blood oxygen monitoring, activity tracking with running routes and step frequency, Apple Health sync on iOS, GPS route recording with background location during workouts, SMS viewing and replying from the watch, call log viewing, watch face management, firmware updates and Find My Phone.

The consequence is a permission surface most users never signed up for. Nothing X now legitimately requests SMS and call log access. For an app that a large share of its ten million installs use purely to change an EQ curve, that is a considerable escalation, and it arrived without anyone being asked. A Nothing account is now required for parts of the experience too, with support articles covering registration, third-party linking, account merging, abnormal-login states, and specifically why you must sign in to reach your own recordings.

Where it sits in the ecosystem

On a Nothing phone, the app partly dissolves into the OS. Controls surface in Bluetooth device details, quick settings and lock-screen widgets, and you check battery from the lock screen rather than opening anything. The standalone app is the cross-platform fallback; the phone is the intended first-class surface, and the gap between those two experiences is deliberate.

Around it sits the Essential suite: Essential Space for capturing ideas, Essential Search, and Essential Memory, which Nothing has announced but not shipped. Essential Space gained cloud sync in April 2026, backing up notes, screenshots, voice recordings, images, and AI summaries against a Nothing account with 2.15 GB free.

Playground is the piece I find most interesting strategically. Launched 30 September 2025 alongside the Nothing OS 4.0 open beta, it is a first-party platform for sharing Essential Apps, Glyph Toys, camera presets and EQ profiles, downloadable directly to the device by QR scan without touching an app store. Nothing has effectively outsourced sound-profile curation to its own user base and then surfaced the best of it inside the app’s Explore tab. It costs them almost nothing, it looks generous, and it builds exactly the kind of community lock-in that survives a bad release.

The subscription nobody has priced

Until this month, Nothing X was free without qualification. The Ear (3a) changed that. Buyers get three months of Pro transcription at 120 minutes a month, after which a subscription is required, and as of today Nothing still has not said what it costs. Seventeen days after launch, you cannot calculate the total cost of owning the feature the product was announced on.

The mitigation, and I do think it counts, is that the paywall sits specifically on cloud processing. Both free models run on device, and the accurate one is good enough for ordinary speech. This is not a feature lock so much as a quality-and-convenience upsell, which is a far better shape than the one I feared when I first read the launch material. What it does establish is a recurring-revenue hook inside a hardware companion app, a two-tier user base where none existed, and a commercial incentive pointing at the cloud in a product whose stated default is local storage.

For reference, the recording hardware is 32MB of flash, Bluetooth 6.0, SBC, AAC and LDAC, up to 45dB wideband ANC, IP54, and 10 hours from the buds or 42 with the case at ANC off. Nobody has confirmed whether audio sitting in that flash is encrypted at rest, which at least one outlet flagged at launch and which remains unanswered.

What reviewers actually like

The consistent line, and it holds up, is that reviewers rate the app higher than the hardware it ships with. SoundGuys calls it one of the best companion apps in wireless audio with the advanced equalizer as the standout. One reviewer stated a flat preference for it over Sony’s Sound Connect on the grounds that the controls are refined and only the features you need sit close to hand. It also gets used as the reference implementation in general write-ups about what headphone apps ought to do, usually on the strength of the QR sharing.

Community reaction to the 2025 redesign was not uniformly hostile either. Plenty of users called it well executed, praised the unified experience, and at least one reported that run tracking on the Watch Pro 2 became accurate again afterward. One small distortion worth knowing about: a heavily upvoted App Store review treats the name literally and praises Nothing X as an app that does nothing at all, which is funny and which nudges the iOS rating up slightly.

The bug catalog

This is the part that took the longest to assemble, and it comes from Nothing’s own community forum, its support knowledge base and store reviews rather than from aggregators.

The redesign fallout

Battery drain dominated. Users described it as impossible to live with and at least one uninstalled the app outright pending a fix, which Nothing staff acknowledged as a known issue with a patch rolling out. It was not actually fixed. It came back with Nothing OS 4.0, with one user reporting 15 to 20 percent overnight consumption on a Phone (2) in airplane mode, still happening after reinstalling the app and stripping its background activity rights.

Crash loops ran alongside it: a persistent “app is not working” popup offering only wait or quit, surviving restarts, and fixed by reinstalling for some users and not others. A subsequent update cleared it within about a week. There was also a strange third-party conflict where the error popup fired roughly once a minute while a user watched DAZN.

The CMF Watch data migration was the messiest piece. Some users got no migration prompt at all and had no export path. Others lost everything, with all settings reset and reminders wiped despite both apps sharing an account, and had to configure the watch as though it were new. Others kept their configuration but had to redo daily goals. The community’s own advice at the time was to wait until the app stabilized before migrating, which the July 2026 deadline eventually made impossible.

Watches also connected over Bluetooth while refusing to connect to the app, a fault that recurred after the crash fix. The home-screen widget could not be added at all, because dragging it opens a pair-and-scan screen that cannot complete: CMF watches bind by QR code, and that flow offers no QR option. Add translation bugs in the training load section and a persistent 24-hour to 12-hour clock flip, and that is one release.

The mock API incident

My favorite finding, in the sense that it is the most revealing. A user on a CMF Phone 2 Pro watched their own network and found Nothing X hammering fakestoreapi.com, dummyapi.online and jsonplaceholder.typicode.com at eighty percent of all requests crossing the network. Those are public API mocking endpoints. They are what you point a screen at while the real backend is still being written. Nothing confirmed it and shipped a fix the following week, so it is resolved, but scaffold code reaching production in an app with ten million installs tells you what the release gate looked like at that moment.

Things that are still broken

Settings that will not persist: a June 2026 Play review reports Ultra Boost switching itself off every time the app is closed, needing manual reactivation. An App Store review documents an iterative EQ fault where moving away from the Dirac preset produced obviously degraded audio, curable by rebooting the buds or toggling superbass, and where a patch fixed that only for the same degradation to reappear when Dirac and superbass were enabled together. Wear detection reads as over-sensitive, with playback pausing when a user bends down because the software reads it as removal, and the same user reported that turning the setting off did not take.

Account handling draws the harshest reviews. One described buttons doing nothing when pressed, in-app account creation failing silently, and credentials created on the website being rejected by the app even after a password reset, followed by support replying with the same boilerplate steps the user had already carried out.

iOS is structurally worse, and Nothing knows it

The support site maintains a whole family of iOS-only articles: why the app cannot pair with earbuds after a factory reset, why CMF earbuds will not pair to an iPhone after a reset, what to do when Watch 3 Pro data will not sync to iOS, and why the app cannot connect to earbuds during a call, that last one with separate articles for the Ear (open), the Nothing Ear, CMF earbuds and the CMF Headphone Pro. Four product families with the same during-a-call failure points at a platform-level Bluetooth problem Nothing has not solved.

The field report that stuck with me came from an iPhone 17 Pro owner whose app worked for about a week and then stopped connecting to their CMF Buds. The buds still paired over Bluetooth and played fine, and worked correctly on Android; the app detected them and then failed to connect. They also could not find any in-app route to report the bug. The thread sat unanswered for months, a second user turned up with the identical fault, and the original poster had by then bought AirPods. That is a customer lost purely to app quality.

Fighting Android’s power management

Nothing’s own remedy for frequent watch disconnection is an admission. Enable background running permissions inside the app, manually whitelist it from Android background cleaning, set battery usage to Unrestricted, allow high background power consumption, and enable auto-start. Five manual interventions to keep a companion app alive, sitting in direct tension with every battery drain complaint in the same forum. The app fights Android’s power management, and the user pays either in disconnections or in battery, with no third option on offer.

The scale of the knowledge base tells its own story: 52 articles on Bluetooth connection issues, 49 on charging, 41 on sound, 28 on application issues, 26 on exercise and health data, 21 on function issues, and 14 on app function issues. Recurring themes include dual connection where only one of two paired devices comes back, charging cases failing to reconnect when opened at low battery, earbuds not auto-reconnecting on returning to range, and gesture controls for skipping and volume that do not work despite being configured. That last one has at least ten separate articles across the Ear (3), Ear (open), CMF earbuds, and the CMF Headphone Pro roller.

Field reports and the balance

The worst class of bug, because the app is the only update channel, is a firmware regression with no forward fix. Ear 2024 owners reported the sound becoming quieter after an update with no remedy other than downgrading, and Nothing X offers no in-app rollback, so downgrading means sideloading, which most people will not do. A CMF Watch owner reported a Nothing X version that would not connect while the watch went to a black screen and locked up. The widget has been reported failing to show a connected Ear (stick), fixable only by restarting and replacing it.

Balance matters here, and I want to state it plainly rather than bury it. On the same threads carrying these complaints, multiple users replied that they have had zero problems with the app. The failure modes look strongly dependent on device and manufacturer, which fits neatly with the background-management picture above, since Android OEMs handle process killing very differently. There is also no structured bug reporting path inside the app, only a generic support form, which is a large part of why the community forum and Reddit function as the actual defect tracker.

Rounding out the list, and routed through the app rather than caused by it: watch sleep tracking recording sleep while the watch is not being worn or during office hours, Strava sync failing on indoor activities, inconsistent email notification delivery, and GPS distance inaccuracy on the Watch 3 Pro.

Privacy

The two store declarations do not match, and the gap is instructive. Google Play’s Data Safety entry says the app may share Location and Health and fitness data with third parties, and may collect Location, Personal info, and Health and fitness, encrypted in transit with deletion available on request. Apple’s App Privacy card is far more conservative, declaring everything as Not Linked to You and covering usage data for analytics plus user content and diagnostics for app functionality. Most of that difference is the watch and health functionality, which gets exercised more fully on Android.

Location is persistent either way. The App Store listing warns the app may use location while closed with a battery cost, and Play notes GPS staying active in the background during workouts. Add the SMS and call log permissions and you have a meaningful surface for something a lot of people installed to adjust treble.

Recording is the change that actually moves the risk. Call recording plus cloud transcription shifts this app from device configuration into processing your private conversations. Nothing’s stated default of local storage with cloud only on explicit transcription is a defensible design, and I will give them that, but the monetized path is the cloud path, and incentives drift. Nothing states that participants get a notification when recording starts, and there is a support article about whether that prompt can be disabled, which is worth watching closely given what the answer implies in two-party-consent jurisdictions. Encryption at rest on the buds remains undocumented. The privacy policy itself is hosted on an S3 bucket rather than on nothing.tech, which is small but tells you how the compliance surface is maintained.

The community rebuilt the app Nothing never shipped

There is no official desktop client, and there never has been. The vacuum got filled entirely by volunteers, and Nothing has tacitly encouraged it, with staff publicly praising the projects on the official forum.

Ear (PC) came first, an Electron Windows app launched in March 2024 covering the Ear (1), Ear (2), and Ear (stick) with a public UI codebase. It is no longer maintained. Its replacement, Ear (web), runs in the browser at earweb.bttl.xyz off the back of Google, enabling the SPP protocol through WebSerial in Chrome, which means any Chromium 117 or later browser on Windows, macOS, Linux or ChromeOS, with no administrator rights needed and no updates to install. It also fixed things the official app got wrong, restoring the ability to switch back to a simple preset after using the advanced equalizer and adding the long-requested noise reduction support for the Ear (stick).

On Linux, there is Nothing-Ear-Linux, a GTK4 and libadwaita Python app replicating core features over the reverse-engineered RFCOMM protocol using only stdlib sockets and D-Bus, and nothing-ear-controller, a GNOME Shell extension putting ANC mode switching, including transparency, into Quick Settings. Gadgetbridge supports the Ear (1) for finding the device, battery level, in-ear detection, and audio profile switching. There is a macOS attempt, nothing-x-macos, whose author got as far as writing to the Bluetooth connection but never managed to read from it, and open-sourced the lot under GPLv3 with a license note explicitly granting Nothing free commercial use of his work. That is a pointed gesture, and I hope somebody there noticed.

One adjacent complaint that gets misattributed constantly: Nothing buds sounding poor on Windows is a codec problem, not a Nothing problem. Windows 11 uses AAC while Windows 10 offers only SBC, and the Ear (PC) developer pointed out it affects far more than Nothing hardware.

What it still needs

The highest-voted request on the Play listing, at 77 people marking it helpful, is persistent LDAC and LHDC quality selection, because “best effort” is useless and Sony’s app has let users pin this for years. After that: an official desktop client, or simply blessing Ear (web); unlocking the PEQ band restrictions the firmware does not impose; adjustable transparency mode, which one user found too quiet to be useful; a richer gesture action library covering skip, bass and treble adjustment, playback speed and scrubbing by a set amount, with user-defined actions; shareable workout cards carrying distance, duration, calories, steps and route map, which a Watch 3 Pro owner asked for and every fitness app already does; an option to disable the audio cue when toggling ANC; a watch home-screen widget that actually adds; real firmware updates for the CMF Watch Pro, whose owners say it is not getting updates matching its capabilities; and feature parity for older hardware, since Ear 2024 owners are still asking whether the EQ Library covers them.

The structural problems are worse than the feature gaps. Nine consecutive releases of “bug fixes and improvements” is not a changelog from a team that has repeatedly shipped regressions; it is a shrug. There is evidently no beta-to-stable quality gate, since the 3.4.1 beta and the redesign both went out with crash loops. Nothing publishes no feature matrix, so buyers discover post-purchase which tier they landed in. And the ecosystem gating on ChatGPT and best-case latency caps the app’s value for the majority of installs, which are not attached to a Nothing phone.

Against the competition

It wins on parametric EQ depth, QR profile sharing, the community EQ library, on-hardware profile storage, hearing personalization through a credible partner, a fast, clean interface, and an unusually aggressive habit of backporting features down to cheap CMF hardware. It loses on the absence of a desktop client where rivals have web or PC paths, on codec quality settings that will not persist where Sony’s do, on platform parity, on background reliability, on changelog transparency, and now on an unpriced subscription.

The App Store’s own “you might also like” rail surfaces Sennheiser Smart Control, HeyMelody, Anker and EarFun Audio, which is roughly the right frame. Nothing is competing on app quality against Sennheiser and Anker rather than against Apple or Sony’s ecosystems, and in that company it is winning comfortably.

Worth remembering how much hardware this thing is now responsible for. Nothing has shipped around seven million devices across both brands, the sub-brand that launched in 2023 with earbuds and a smartwatch grew fast enough that its first phone moved 100,000 units in three hours, and CMF has since been spun out as a standalone company while its audio and watch hardware still lives inside Nothing’s app. That last arrangement is stranger the longer you look at it.

What I still do not know

What Pro transcription costs, which is the big one, and the free window for launch-day Ear (3a) buyers runs out around 7 October. Whether audio sitting in the buds is encrypted at rest. How many CMF Watch owners missed the 19 July migration and are holding a watch they cannot pair, given how badly the migration assistant behaved in beta. Whether the recording suite backports to the Ear (3) and Headphone (1), which is complicated by the Ear (3) solving the storage problem in the case rather than the buds. Whether the battery drain is finally fixed, after two attempts and reports spanning July to December 2025. Whether the EQ Library ever expands past the Headphone (1) and Ear (3). Whether that mock API traffic really stopped, which wants an independent packet capture rather than my trust. And whether the Ear 2024 volume regression ever gets fixed forward, because downgrade-only is not a resolution when the app has no rollback.

I have spent a week inside this app, and I still think it is the best companion software in wireless audio, which is exactly why the state of it bothers me. The EQ engine is better than anything a rival ships, and the app throttles it. The community wrote the desktop client, the Linux tools, and the browser version, and got a thank-you post for their trouble. Nothing keeps adding surface, watches, health data, recording, a subscription, while the same battery drain thread stays open and the changelog stays empty. Unlock the bands, make LDAC quality persist, and write four real sentences about what changed in each release. None of that demos well on a stage in London, which is presumably why the roadmap keeps pointing somewhere else.

Sources