The Nothing Phone 1 is easily one of the most beautiful smartphones on the market, with its unique light-up notification “glyphs” and glass-aluminum design. The maker has also been receptive towards the aftermarket developer community on XDA. Apart from the ready availability of the kernel sources, you can easily unlock the bootloader of the phone, which means diving into the modding scene is rather seamless for the Nothing Phone 1.

Help! My phone isn't turning on

However, modifying your device is not without its risks, and it can even lead to you temporarily bricking your phone. If you don't want to pay a visit to a service center or ship your phone to one but would like to bring your phone back from the dead, you need to find an appropriate flashing tool that can communicate with the device using the SoC-specific low-level flashing protocol. Devices with Qualcomm Snapdragon chipsets feature an alternative boot mode called Emergency Download Mode (EDL), which is strictly intended for OEM servicing. Now you can finally make use of this mode to revive your device.

XDA Senior Member mark332 has put together all the required packages in one place and designed a handy GUI so that you can use it to revive your Nothing Phone 1 even from a hard brick. The tool requires Windows, although you can technically use it on Linux as well if you manage to get your hands on the appropriate Qualcomm flashing binaries.

How to unbrick the Nothing Phone 1

Unlike Google, Nothing doesn't maintain an official portal for the factory images corresponding to the Nothing Phone 1. Of course, you can manually grab the OTA packages from our Nothing Phone 1 update tracker, but that won't be enough to revive your device when you can't even access the bootloader/Fastboot mode and are stuck with something like this:

Nothing Phone 1 hardbrick

Luckily, you can force the Phone 1 to get into the EDL mode by a key combo. Just make sure the target device is completely switched off, then hold down both volume up and volume down buttons when plugging your phone back into your PC. You also need a modified USB cable in order to force the device to boot into EDL mode.

In case the above method doesn't work, you have to disassemble the phone and short two test points. If everything goes right, the phone should boot into the EDL mode at this point, which can be easily verified by searching for a new “Qualcomm HS-USB QDLoader 9008” entry (or “QHUSB_BULK,” if the driver isn’t properly installed) under Device Manager.

Notably, the adb reboot edl command should be enough to boot to the emergency download mode for this phone when Android is booted, but it's useless for a hard brick scenario.

Now that your PC can recognize the phone in EDL mode, we can proceed to the next phase. To flash the device, do the following:

  1. Download the flashing tool from mark332's thread.
  2. Unpack the flashing tool somewhere with a short path and without any spaces (e.g. D:\unbricktool).
  3. Make sure the Nothing Phone 1 is connected to the PC in QDLoader 9008 mode through a virtual COM port.
  4. Launch the unbricktool.exe and check whether it lists the same COM port on the upper right-hand side.
  5. Select "Firmware Flash," click on "START," and wait for the process to finish.
  6. The phone should reboot into a fully working Nothing OS environment.
Nothing Phone 1 unbrick tool

The tool will completely wipe your phone during the flashing process. It will (re-)lock the bootloader of the target device as well. That’s not such a big deal, given that you can easily unlock again, but it’s still worth noting.

What's next?

Keep in mind that the EDL package is based on Nothing OS 1.1.7, not the recently released Nothing OS 1.5.2 based on Android 13. With that said, it's quite easy to sideload the Nothing OS updates manually, so you can instantly reach to the latest firmware after unbricking your phone without waiting for a series of OTAs.

Thanks to almost unrestricted low level access, the tool is powerful enough to read back partition contents, back up the IMEI and similar unique identifiers, change the region, and a lot more. Hence, only attempt to tinker if you know what you're doing.

Nothing Phone 1 XDA forums


Source: XDA forums (1, 2)