The Nothing Phone 1’s Android 13 update also brings the Personal Safety app, joining the ranks of several other devices to ship the once Pixel-exclusive safety app. Personal Safety is a new optional preload available in the GMS package for Android 13.
The Personal Safety app for OEMs requires the build to declare the com.google.android.feature.PERSONAL_SAFETY feature. The Nothing Phone 1 joins the Xperia 1 IV, the Xperia 5 IV, and a bunch of Vivo phones on Android 13 to ship with the Personal Safety app.
If you were wondering whether this means the Nothing Phone 1 will support car crash detection like Pixels, you’ll need to temper your expectations. Earlier this year, Google was working to bring car crash detection to non-Pixel smartphones, but as noted in this article, that isn’t enabled on the Nothing Phone 1 yet.
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Furthermore, at least in the current release, it doesn’t look like the Nothing Phone 1 can even support Google’s car crash detection implementation. That’s because the car crash detection nanoapp isn’t there (/vendor/etc/chre/cc.so). More importantly, Nothing hasn’t implemented support for Android’s Context Hub Runtime Environment (android.hardware.context_hub = false).
I doubt Google would completely reimplement the way car crash detection on Pixel works just for OEMs, so unless the Nothing Phone 1 (and other non-Pixel phones with the Personal Safety app) implements support for the CHRE API in a future release, the Pixel’s car crash detection likely won’t be added. At least Phone 1 and other non-Pixel users can enjoy the other safety features of the Personal Safety app!
