Let's face it: the Nothing Phone 1 was more showy than substantive. It stood out with its design but fell short in the camera and software support department, at least out of the gate. Nothing has worked on fixing the phone's shortcomings by loading up on software engineers and then pushing multiple updates improving the camera performance. From the outset, however, Nothing has been committed to the customization geek, opening up its kernel sources and the full device tree to encourage third-party development. That led to the folks at Paranoid Android getting involved and now, after four long months of alpha and beta testing, its stable Android 13-derived Topaz build for the Nothing Phone 1 is finally here.

Incidentally, Paranoid's ROM arrives hot on the heels of the public release of Nothing OS 1.5. If you were previously running the Android 13 Nothing OS beta on your Phone 1, you might consider installing Paranoid Android Topaz. The custom ROM delivers an experience greatly different from the official software the phone ships with.

If you were previously rocking the Paranoid Android beta but were frustrated with some missing features, you would be happy to know almost all the broken functionality has been fixed and the bugs have been squashed in the stable release. This includes the Glyph integrations that were not working in the previous Topaz beta.

Upgrading to the stable build from the beta is also a seamless process — no data wipe required. But if you plan on installing the ROM for the first time, you'll have to unlock the phone's bootloader to flash a custom recovery and that will require a full device reset. The effort could be well worth it though, especially if you want more customization options and better performance from your Phone 1.

You can download Paranoid Android's Topaz stable release for the Nothing Phone 1 from the organization's website.