In today’s highly competitive smartphone market, brands are constantly fighting to win over consumers, and with so many options available, user satisfaction has become more critical than ever to build a loyal user base. At 91mobiles, we regularly conduct The Great Indian Smartphone Survey to understand ownership patterns and identify areas where brands deliver satisfactory user experiences. The 2026 edition, which saw participation from over 10,000 respondents, offers several valuable insights into the current state of the market. While we’ll be releasing the full survey insights soon, this article focuses on Nothing, which emerged as the top user pick for delivering the best Android software experience. The brand also ranked highly in cameras and value-for-money propositions, positioning it as a notable player in India’s smartphone landscape.
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Nothing OS leads the way in offering the best Android software performance
- Nothing ranks highest among Android brands for delivering the best software experience, ahead of Google, Samsung, and OnePlus.
- Interestingly, established brands like Google, Samsung, and OnePlus trail behind Nothing. This could be attributed to Nothing’s approach to delivering a software experience that looks distinct, feels burdenless to use, and prioritises swiftness with minimal bloatware.
- Software update frequency plays a crucial role in keeping users invested long-term in a software skin. As noted in our Nothing Phone (4a) re-review, the phone has regularly received OTA updates since its release, improving stability, performance, and battery endurance over time. With most Nothing smartphones getting the same treatment, this could also be a strong reason for survey participants to choose Nothing OS as the top-performing Android skin.
- On top of this, while Nothing jumped on the AI bandwagon a bit later than the competition, its suite of AI features under Essential AI is touted to help users organise information, aid speech output, and build apps without coding knowledge. These include Essential Space for storing key texts and images to revisit later, Essential Voice, an advanced speech-to-text tool that removes filler words, and Essential Apps that let users build their own AI-based apps or widgets for specific use cases.
- On the personalisation front, the widgets on Nothing OS are what give the skin a flair of fun, allowing users to customise their lockscreen and homescreen on a deep level, while Nothing OS was among the first Android skins to introduce resizing of quick settings toggles.
- With the upcoming Nothing OS 5.0 update, the brand goes deeper into customisation, productivity, performance, and more AI use cases, making it the company’s biggest software release so far. The update is already live in Open Beta form for the Phone (3) and Phone (4a) Pro.
Nothing holds strong positions in several user satisfaction aspects
Beyond software, Nothing has earned top rankings in a couple of user satisfaction categories.
- Almost 74 percent of the survey takers using a Nothing smartphone claim that they’re satisfied with the results delivered by the rear camera, outpacing the likes of Google and Samsung.
- Although the brand has released only three smartphones so far in 2026, the Nothing Phone (4a) and Phone (4a) Pro, in particular, boast one of the most flexible camera setups in their respective price segments.
- Both feature a 50MP primary camera, an 8MP ultrawide, and a 50MP telephoto lens with 3.5x optical zoom for capturing long-range shots, portraits with natural bokeh, and close-ups. Furthermore, Nothing deploys TrueLens Engine to ensure shadows and highlights in images are well balanced.
- Despite the smartphone industry going through a tough phase of constant memory price hikes, and with the Phone (4a) series and Phone (4b) now costing more than their original launch prices, 72.5 percent of Nothing users still regard the brand as offering the most value for money.
- As noted above, this may be attributed to a combination of flexible camera setups, sufficient levels of performance, distinct phone designs, and a to-the-point software user interface.
Given the survey results, it’s impressive to see Nothing, a company founded in 2022, perform so well in satisfying its users across multiple parameters, especially software. Whether it’s its distinct software identity, striking smartphone designs, or performance in crucial areas like cameras, Nothing has shown that a brand can build a loyal user base by listening to feedback and improving with each model to deliver well-balanced devices.
On the contrary, as far as our experience with Nothing OS is concerned, it may still require some work in adding immersion to the UI through blur elements and improving haptics integration to fully leverage the strong haptic motors Nothing phones pack.
