Nothing CEO Carl Pei: Smartphone Apps Will Disappear, Replaced by AI Agents

Carl Pei, founder and CEO of Nothing, has made a bold prediction: the mobile apps we know will become a thing of the past. AI agents, systems that can understand a user's intent and carry out tasks on their own, will replace them. The smartphone of the future is not a grid of icons but an intelligent platform that acts in your place.

Pei is one of the most visible voices in consumer electronics. A former co-founder of OnePlus, he founded Nothing in 2020 with the ambition of building a device ecosystem that could challenge the dominance of Apple and Samsung. In a few years, the company has released a line of smartphones with a distinctive transparent design, along with earbuds that caught the attention of the tech-enthusiast community worldwide.

His thesis about the death of apps fits into a broader conversation across the industry. Today, hundreds of millions of people open dozens of apps every day to order a taxi, check the weather, book a restaurant or answer an email. Each of these actions requires a separate interface, a login and manual input. By Pei's logic, an AI agent will do all of this itself: you only need to say or write what you want.

The idea is not new. Apple Intelligence, Google Gemini on Android and Microsoft Copilot: all the major platforms are moving toward built-in AI assistants that integrate on top of apps. OpenAI is building an agent layer through Operator. Anthropic is developing Computer Use. Startups such as Rabbit and Humane tried to create fundamentally new devices to replace the smartphone, with mixed success. Pei sees it differently: the device will remain a smartphone, but its essence will change.

The key question is not "will apps disappear" but "when." Today's agents handle simple tasks but perform poorly in complex scenarios: they make mistakes in multi-step chains, fail in unusual situations and need clear context. The gap between what agents can do and what users expect is still huge. Even so, the pace of improvement, comparing 2025-2026 models with those from two years ago, suggests this is a matter of a few years, not decades.

For app developers, this shift means a fundamentally new market. If an agent becomes the intermediary between user and service, monetization, design, UX and distribution change completely. The icon on the home screen loses its meaning. What matters more is how well an agent can understand your API or service.

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

Pei's forecast is neither fantasy nor a marketing stunt. 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 use every day, and whose rules will apply when they do.