I'm a lazy man and I'll happily admit it. If a task takes three taps, I'll hunt for a way to make it one. So when I came across Kea, an app that promises "four shortcuts on one button", I installed it before finishing my coffee.
It's built mainly for Nothing phones and I tested it on my Nothing Phone 3 running Nothing OS 5.0 Open Beta.
Finally, a Job for the Essential Key
The Essential Key is a neat idea, with the catch that it's tied to Essential Space. Nothing has confirmed that official remapping will arrive with Nothing OS 5.1, but until then, the usual workarounds mean disabling Essential Space through ADB commands and installing a separate mapper app. That's a lot of effort for a button press.
Kea skips all that. Press the key during setup and the app learns its "hardware fingerprint", with no PC or ADB involved. Within minutes, the Essential Key on my Nothing Phone 3 was launching apps I actually use.
Nothing's own remapping will make this less urgent once it lands, but Kea is the easy fix today and it stacks four gestures on a single key. For example, a single press turns on the torch, a double press takes a screenshot, a triple press opens an app, and a long press launches your voice assistant.
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Setup, Feedback and Action Lab
Kea walks you through the permissions. You switch on its accessibility service, which it says is used for key presses only, allow drawing over other apps for on-screen confirmation and set background use to Unrestricted so your phone doesn't kill the app.
Android will warn you about "full control" of the phone, which is standard for key mappers, so go in knowing it. Each press gets a quick haptic buzz (which you can heavily personalise, by the way) and an overlay in either a Halo or Bloom style, so you know it registered.
You can also set the timing of the gestures, which allows you to control "how long you hold before the long-press action fires" on the Essential Key (or any other dedicated action key for that matter).
You can also change the app's appearance in several ways than one, taking it from "Translucent light" to "Translucent dark", and even choosing a custom colour for the app icon. You can also choose to "Match my wallpaper", all of which is super cool.
The smartest feature, if you ask me, is Action Lab (Pro-only). This allows you to chain actions together so one press can mute the phone, turn on the torch, and lock the screen in a fraction of a second.
There's also an edge-swipe App Sidebar for shortcuts, which is also part of the Pro plan. But since most UIs already have a native sidebar, you won't really miss out on anything here.
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It Isn't Just for Nothing Phones Actually
I also installed Kea on my OnePlus 11R. It didn't recognise the phone and neither was it in the manual selection option, but the "Teach Kea your key" step picked up the alert slider. Once mapped, it worked well enough. The Glyph extras and call recording are Nothing-only, so you won't get those.
The free version covered most of my needs. Kea Pro is a one-time purchase at Rs 199 and adds volume key remapping, Action Lab combos, custom colours and sidebar tweaks, plus Glyph Timer and Glyph Torch on Nothing phones.
If you only want the Essential Key to work, skip Pro. If you like chaining actions, it should be worth it. Overall, I think these guys are definitely onto something here and it's a pretty well-thought-out app for the most part.
Even once Nothing OS 5.1 arrives, four gestures per key and the ability to remap other buttons keep Kea useful. And my laziness has never been so productive. I think I just might get the Pro!
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