Google releases standalone Gemini app for iPhone

The AI wars are nothing if not persistent. Apple, Meta, OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft are all charging ahead, doing their best to make their new AI tools an indispensable part of our daily lives.

Google’s latest multi-modal AI is called Gemini and it has been available for some time now, easily selectable with a single tap at the top of the Google app on iPhone. Now, in an effort to better promote it, the company has released a stand-alone Gemini iPhone app.

The accompanying blog post details all the many things you can do with Gemini, including image generation (Google’s Imagen3 is pretty good) and a live conversational assistant mode called Gemini Live that supports 12 languages with more on the way. Of course, Gemini can hook into your Google account and use all the data from Google apps and services, like your Google calendars, contacts, e-mails, and so on.

There doesn’t appear to be anything in the Gemini app that you couldn’t just do in the Google app by tapping the toggle at the top of the screen to switch between Search and Gemini. Perhaps Google is setting itself up for future customization of its dedicated Gemini app, or integration with iOS in some future Apple Intelligence release. Or maybe taking the same exact feature and dropping it into its own app is just a way to draw some attention to it.