Google is on a determined mission to make Gemini an indispensable part of our daily routines. With deeper integrations into popular apps like Spotify and the Pixel 9 series shipping with Gemini as the default assistant, it’s clear that Google has ambitious plans for its AI model.
The tech giant has been strategically enhancing Gemini’s functionality with new extensions. After adding extensions for Google apps like Keep, Tasks, and Calendar, along with YouTube and YouTube Music, recent findings suggest even more exciting additions are on the horizon.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
In the Google app version 15.34.32.29.arm64 beta, we could enable the toggles for new Gemini extensions for WhatsApp, Google Messages, and Android system notifications. While they aren’t working just yet, their official descriptions provide a glimpse into what they might offer.
One of the things I initially liked about Pixels was that I could uninstall/disable a lot of the proprietary garbage that would be mandatory on other phones. But now it looks like Google is abandoning that flexibility in favour of shoehorning Gemini into everything.
My only interaction with Gemini so far was telling it to kick rocks when it sent me an unsolicited text message. I also barely use Assistant to begin with. So once my current phone dies, I guess I’ll have to find something new.
Don’t worry in a year or two they’ll have a competing Ai assistant and break any functionality of Gemini and leave everything half baked on the new one
Well, one of the great things about Pixels is that you can install an alternative OS (I use GrapheneOS) that doesn’t come with that crap anyway. I use GrapheneOS, and it has none of Google’s crap. I made a separate profile for the handful of apps that require Google stuff (a couple work apps), and I only access it for less than a minute at a time, and those apps (Google Play Services) have no access to the device’s storage that they don’t strictly need (hooray storage scopes!).
The ironic thing is that I use Google’s phone specifically to avoid Google.
I did similar, I needed a new phone so I picked pixel so I could use GrapheneOS continue the process of degoogling my life.
To be fair, you don’t need a Pixel to degoogle, there are a couple other high quality ROMs that can help with that. But I do think GrapheneOS on Google Pixel is the gold standard, because you get all of the security features Google has put into the Pixel, but without Google’s spyware.