Nothing CEO Carl Pei: smartphone apps will disappear — AI agents will replace them

Carl Pei, founder and CEO of Nothing, made a bold prediction: the familiar mobile applications will become a thing of the past. Their place will be taken by AI agents — systems capable of understanding user intent and independently executing tasks. The smartphone of the future is not a set of icons, but an intelligent platform that acts on your behalf.

Pei is one of the most prominent voices in consumer electronics. A former co-founder of OnePlus, he founded Nothing in 2020 with the ambition to create an ecosystem of devices that would counter the dominance of Apple and Samsung. Over the course of several years, the company has released a line of smartphones with a signature transparent design and headphones that have captured the attention of the tech community worldwide.

His thesis about the death of applications fits into a broader conversation that the entire industry is conducting. Today, hundreds of millions of people open dozens of applications every day to order a taxi, check the weather, book a restaurant, or reply to an email. Each of these actions requires a separate interface, login, and manual input.

An AI agent, according to Pei's logic, would do all this on its own — you simply need to say or express what you want. This idea is not new. Apple Intelligence, Google Gemini on Android, Microsoft Copilot — all major platforms are moving toward built-in AI assistants that integrate on top of applications.

OpenAI is building an agent layer through Operator. Anthropic is developing Computer Use. Startups like Rabbit and Humane tried to create fundamentally new devices that replace the smartphone — with mixed results.

Pei looks at it differently: the device will remain a smartphone, but its essence will change. The key question is not "will applications disappear," but "when." Today's agents handle simple tasks well, but perform poorly in complex scenarios: they make mistakes in multi-step chains, struggle with non-standard situations, and require clear context.

The gap between the capabilities of agents and user expectations is still enormous. Nevertheless, the pace of improvements — models from 2025-2026 compared to models from two years ago — suggests that this is a matter of several years, not decades. For app developers, this shift means a fundamentally new market.

If an agent becomes the intermediary between the user and the service, monetization, design, UX, and distribution change completely. An icon on the home screen loses its meaning. What becomes more important is how well your API or service is understood by the agent.

Nothing has not yet announced specific products in this direction. But Pei's words are a signal of how the company views the future of its devices. Likely, the next step is deep integration of an AI agent into Nothing OS, which currently is based on Android.

Pei's forecast is not fantasy and not a marketing trick. It is an honest assessment of the direction in which the entire industry is moving. The question is who exactly will build the agent layer that people will use every day — and whose rules will be in effect in the meantime.