It’s been 3 months, and Nothing’s Glyph Matrix still feels like a gimmick

I like to think that I was cautiously optimistic when Nothing swapped from the line-based Glyph Interface to the dot-based Glyph Matrix with the launch of its Phone 3. In reality, though, I was mostly just cautious. I was worried that in trying to make its iconic LED lights do even more, Nothing would wind up with another attractive but ultimately useless gimmick — kind of like its pseudo-transparent back panels. And, now that it’s been a few months, I feel like I was right.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve given the Glyph Matrix its chance. I’ve installed just about every Glyph-themed app to make its way to the Play Store, figuring that one of them — just one of them — would add something good. And, on a surface level, they’ve at least added something. I picked up a digital leveler and a new toy called Glyph Dial from a paid app called Glyphify, and more recently installed a 50/50 chance simulator called Coin Flip from Dot Hub. They’re all… fine.

Well, of those three, I have to give Glyph Dial the most credit. It’s the one Glyph Toy that I’ve actually started using regularly, as it lets me create a speed dial for ten contacts of my choosing. All I have to do is press the little Glyph button on the back panel, cycle through contacts, and raise my Nothing Phone 3 to my ear to start a phone call. And, if I spent more time actually calling people, it would be brilliant.

Unfortunately, though, I’ve found some pretty consistent limitations across the rest of my new Toys. The leveler, for example, works pretty well until you consider the fact that you’re using the display of your Phone 3 as the leveling surface. Now, if you’re just hanging a poster, that’s probably fine, but if you need to level anything rougher, you’re probably going to cringe the whole way through. I’d also much rather carry around a single coin — or pull one from my car — than toggle through a whole list of tools to find the right one.

But hey, at least Nothing is taking some of the best community-made Toys and baking them into recent Nothing OS updates. One such example is a compass that you can toggle between degrees and cardinal directions. It’s a good idea, though one I might have expected at launch rather than a few months later.

Only, there’s a problem with the compass, too: I can’t get it to point the right way. When I sit it down next to my iPhone 17 Pro, I find that Nothing’s compass is off by as much as 90 degrees, indicating that true North is actually Northeast, or worse, East. Other times, though, it’s spot-on, which somehow makes it harder to trust. Thankfully, I know my way around my grid-organized neighborhood, but I could very much see the Phone 3 leading someone astray in a more meandering city.

At the very least, I have to give independent developers some credit for trying. They’ve taken Nothing’s developer kit and run with it, populating the Play Store with a handful of paid and free apps that keep me coming back to the Phone 3. They’re doing their best to make the Glyph Matrix interesting, but they’ve yet to make it truly practical. Games like Glyph Bike give the small, dot-based interface a little bit of retro flair, but it’s hard to say that they make the phone better — at least for more than five or so minutes at a time.

To me, the biggest problem with getting five minutes of entertainment out of an app is, well, that you have your phone for way longer than five minutes a day. You actually have to use it for things like calling, texting, and staying productive — none of which the Glyph Matrix really does. Sure, you’ll see an incoming call in the form of flashing patterns, but you could do that before with the original Glyph Interface. And, when the cost of this new light-up experience is that it’s almost impossible to find a sturdy phone case, it becomes even harder to get excited about Nothing’s latest design.

There’s also the simple fact that developers haven’t really given the Glyph Matrix nearly enough love. After three months of open development, you would at least hope to see a few dozen apps hit the Play Store, and they haven’t. Currently, searching for “glyph matrix” yields fewer than a dozen hits, many of which still display the old Glyph Interface rather than the new setup.

I, of course, don’t really want to be this doom and gloom about one of the more unique Android features on the market right now. I would love to hype up the Glyph Matrix as much as I’ve hyped the rest of Nothing OS. However, Nothing doesn’t seem any more interested in making the matrix any more interesting than the independent developers do. It hasn’t added support for its in-house Glyph Composer — an app that otherwise would seem like a no-brainer in terms of adding some substance to its style. In fact, Nothing hasn’t touched its Glyph Composer since early July 2025 — right after its long-awaited return to the flagship space.

So, if Nothing doesn’t seem to care about its Glyph Matrix, I’ll keep asking why I should feel any different?