Will artificial intelligence kill smartphone apps?
It sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie, but that is exactly what Carl Pei, co-founder and CEO of Nothing, stated publicly at SXSW, the iconic tech and culture festival held in Austin, Texas.
For those unfamiliar, Nothing is a consumer electronics brand that made a name for itself with smartphones featuring a unique transparent design that became the company’s signature look.
Carl Pei is not just some random founder talking big. He had a stint at OnePlus before launching Nothing, and now he is placing his company at the center of a major bet: building the first truly AI-driven device, where the apps we know today simply cease to exist.
His statement was blunt and to the point:
Apps are going to disappear. And if the value of your product depends on your app, it will be disrupted, whether you like it or not.
Pretty bold, right? But what is behind this vision, what it means in practice, and why it matters so much right now is what we are going to dig into here. 👇
The end of apps as we know them
Think about it: the logic behind apps on smartphones has barely changed since the App Store launched back in 2008. We download a separate app for everything, navigate through menus, tap buttons, fill out forms, and slowly figure out where each feature is buried inside each screen. It is a model that works, but it was clearly designed in an era when artificial intelligence was still just a promise.
What Carl Pei is saying is that this model has reached its limit, and that the next big leap will not be a better app but rather the elimination of the need to navigate through apps in the first place.
During his interview at SXSW, Pei was very specific about this. He compared the current smartphone structure to devices that existed even before the iPhone, like the Palm Pilots and PDAs of the 2000s. According to him, we have lock screens, home screens, apps arranged in a grid, each app taking up the entire display, and an app store to download more. That logic is nearly 20 years old and has not really changed.
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The core idea is that in a world dominated by artificial intelligence, you simply say what you need and the system handles it. No opening a banking app to make a transfer, no jumping into a restaurant app to make a reservation, no switching between five different apps to plan a trip. The interface stops being a collection of icons on a screen and becomes a conversation, a context, an intention. This completely changes how we think about user experience on mobile devices because the very concept of navigating a visual interface could become a thing of the past.
This is not just theory. Nothing has already raised a Series C round of 200 million dollars, led by Tiger Global, specifically to build this kind of AI-driven device. The company is literally betting that whoever manages to create this conversational and contextual artificial intelligence layer before everyone else will have a massive advantage. And the market is paying attention because Carl Pei’s argument makes sense, especially at a time when large language models are becoming increasingly capable of understanding context, intent, and executing complex tasks autonomously.
The steps toward the smartphone of the future according to Carl Pei
One interesting thing Pei detailed during his interview at SXSW is that he does not envision this transformation happening all at once. He described very clear stages of how artificial intelligence will evolve within mobile devices.
The first step, which some companies are already testing today, is having an AI that executes specific commands at the user’s request. Things like booking flights, reserving hotels, or placing restaurant orders. Pei acknowledged that this stage exists but was pretty blunt in calling it super boring. It is basically task automation, nothing that radically changes the way we use our devices.
The second step is where things get really interesting. At this stage, artificial intelligence begins learning the user’s long-term intentions. If you want to be healthier, for example, the device would understand that goal and start giving you proactive suggestions, reminders, and encouragement without you having to ask. It is like having a personal assistant who knows you deeply and anticipates your needs.
Pei explained that the most advanced level of this evolution is when the system starts suggesting things you did not even know you wanted. He compared this concept to the memory feature in ChatGPT, where the model accumulates context about the user over time and uses it to deliver increasingly personalized and relevant responses.
In Carl Pei’s ultimate vision, the smartphone of the future would be a device that does things for you without needing to be told. It is not just about answering questions or executing tasks on demand. It is about anticipating, acting, and resolving, all in the background, with the least amount of human intervention possible. 🚀
The friction problem with today’s smartphones
Carl Pei used a simple yet powerful example to illustrate why the current smartphone structure needs to change. He asked: how many steps does it take for you to grab a coffee with someone?
It seems like a trivial thing, but think about the number of apps involved. First, you need a messaging app to coordinate with the person. Then a maps app to find a coffee shop. Maybe an Uber to get there. And a calendar to check if you are actually free. That is at least four different apps to accomplish one simple intention.
This fragmentation is exactly the kind of friction that user experience has always tried to minimize. Apps were a step in that direction, organizing features in a visual and accessible way. But they also created new types of friction: the need to learn each interface separately, to manage notifications from dozens of apps, to update everything constantly, and to deal with information scattered across multiple apps that do not talk to each other.
The promise of artificial intelligence is to collapse all of that into a single, intelligent layer. In Pei’s vision, the future of smartphones and operating systems should work like this: the system knows you deeply, understands your intention, and simply executes, without you having to manually go through all those apps.
Imagine waking up in the morning and, instead of opening five different apps, simply asking your smartphone: how is my day looking? And it already knows you have a meeting at 10 a.m., that traffic is heavy on the route you normally take, that your flight tomorrow has a slight delay, and that the temperature is going to drop in the afternoon so you will need a jacket. This is not fiction. It is what artificial intelligence models can already do when properly integrated, and it is exactly the kind of user experience that companies like Nothing are aiming for. The interface gets out of the way and all that remains is the right answer at the right time.
Interfaces built for AI agents, not for humans
A very relevant technical point that Carl Pei raised at SXSW is about the interface of future devices. According to him, it is not enough to have an AI agent trying to use the same interface that was designed for humans. You know those demos where a virtual bot navigates through menus, tapping buttons and swiping screens as if it were a person? Pei was clear: that is not the future.
What he advocates for is the creation of interfaces specifically designed for AI agents. Instead of artificial intelligence mimicking a human touch on a screen, services need to offer native pathways so that the AI can access their features directly and without friction. This is a fundamental difference in systems architecture that completely changes how developers will need to think about their products going forward.
Pei summed it up well: the future is not the agent using a human interface. The future is building an interface for the agent to use. And that is the approach most prepared for what is coming next.
From a technical standpoint, this shift requires artificial intelligence to have deep access to the operating system, user data, and external services, all at the same time and in a secure manner. It is a massive challenge in architecture and privacy, but the pieces are starting to fall into place. Companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft are already placing their bets in this direction, integrating language models directly into operating systems and creating APIs that allow AI to execute actions within other services without the user ever having to open a single app manually. The race has already begun.
Apps will not vanish tomorrow, but the transition has already started
It is worth noting that Carl Pei himself made an important caveat during the interview. He is not saying apps will disappear tomorrow. Nothing’s operating system even allows users to create their own mini apps using the concept of vibe coding, showing that the company still recognizes the value of apps in the current moment.
What Pei is signaling is a direction, a long-term trend that will gradually transform how we interact with our devices. Apps will migrate from rich, self-contained visual interfaces to modular services that artificial intelligence accesses in the background, without the user needing to interact with them directly. In this model, the value of a product shifts away from the beauty of the interface and toward the quality of the data, the reliability of the service, and the ability to integrate with the AI systems that will orchestrate everything.
It is a pretty radical paradigm shift, but the signs are already on the horizon. And the speed at which large language models are evolving suggests this transition could happen faster than many people expect.
What this means for anyone building apps today
If Carl Pei’s vision materializes, and there are good reasons to believe at least part of it will become reality, the impact for anyone developing apps today is enormous. The monetization logic of most apps is directly tied to engagement with the interface: the more time a user spends inside the app, the more ads they see, the more purchases they make, the more data they generate. If artificial intelligence becomes the intermediary layer between the user and the service, the app is no longer the main point of contact, and that entire business model needs to be rethought from scratch.
For anyone working in interface design, mobile development, or user experience, this is a moment that demands full attention. The skills of understanding human behavior, mapping needs, and eliminating friction remain essential, but the context of application changes completely. Instead of designing screens and navigation flows, the work may evolve into something closer to designing conversations, defining how artificial intelligence should communicate, what information it prioritizes, and how it ensures the user always feels in control even when the machine is doing almost everything. 🤖
Why Nothing is at the forefront of this conversation
Nothing is not the biggest tech company in the world, far from it. But it has something the giants often lose when they get too big: the freedom to bet on radical ideas without needing to protect an established business model. Carl Pei understands that, which is why he uses stages like SXSW to provoke the industry with statements that sound outrageous until suddenly they do not anymore.
That is how Nothing entered the smartphone market with a design nobody asked for but everybody started wanting, and it is with that same energy that the company is now targeting the future of artificial intelligence on mobile devices.
Carl Pei’s statement at SXSW was no accident. The festival is exactly the kind of environment where provocative ideas gain traction and reach investors, developers, and thought leaders who will carry them back to their companies and communities. By positioning Nothing as the company that will build the first truly AI-driven smartphone, Carl Pei is doing much more than announcing a product: he is defining a narrative, and strong narratives have the power to shape the market even before any product actually exists.
What makes this bet interesting is that it does not rely on technology alone. It depends on convincing users, developers, and partners that the app model is truly on borrowed time, and that it is worth building the next ecosystem now, before the major platforms close the door on latecomers. If Nothing can rally the right people around this vision, the company could play a role disproportionate to its size in defining how the smartphones of the future will work, and how user experience will be redesigned for an era where artificial intelligence handles most of the heavy lifting. 💡
