Over the last 15 months, Google’s Gemini AI has expanded across almost every aspect of the company’s business, from data centers through to your gadgets. Nowhere is Gemini’s importance to Google’s business clearer than on your Android phone. Almost every one of Google’s apps is getting some sort of Gemini integration, and the company is showing no signs of slowing down, bringing its AI platform to all the products you love.
“What’s exciting about right now is we have changes that are fundamentally influencing human-computer interface,” says Sameer Samat, Google’s President of the Android ecosystem in an exclusive interview with Android Police. “That hasn’t happened since the transition to mobile.”
“It’s a real opportunity, and we are taking that incredibly seriously at Android. We think we have the ability for your phone to truly be the conduit to a personal assistant. Who doesn’t want a personal assistant that can help you do all kinds of things in your life?”
If you own an Android phone, you’ve likely spotted Gemini appearing in Google’s services. Whether you’re writing an email, looking through a report on Sheets, or you’re entering a new appointment into Calendar, Gemini is there aiming to improve the experience. Even writing this interview, Google Docs was telling me it can refine my writing with Gemini.
If you use ChatGPT, Perplexity or any other alternative to Gemini, that won’t be embedded into your Android phone like Gemini is. Apple Intelligence is getting close, but the integration on Google is stronger. The company is uniquely positioned in the industry right now to have assistive AI tech that will work across services and also directly within your phone or tablet’s software.
It’s all available to you right on top of whatever you’re doing
Samat said, “The integration with Android is what I’m excited about, because by placing it there, it’s not just saying it’s easy to access. It’s saying that it is an AI layer that exists on top of your experience on the phone. So it’s not a separate application you go to, it’s not a website you visit once in a while. It’s all available to you right on top of whatever you’re doing.”
Samat says his own personal favorite Gemini feature is YouTube summaries for watching long-form video content. Samat is a big history nerd, and he spends a lot of his free time watching YouTube videos about military history. He showed me an example on his Pixel 9 Pro Fold, and his YouTube recommended page was chock-full of historical explainers.
“In the notes of the summary, it gives you links where you can tap into that precise moment in the video,” Samat says. “I end up watching a lot of the video anyway. I may watch it out of order, and then I might have extra questions that I want to have a conversation about.”
He’s referring to the company’s Gemini Live feature that allows for more natural conversations with its AI assistant. You can speak back and forth with the AI for a more natural conversation than you’d have with a normal text-based AI. The company revealed at MWC 2025 that Gemini Live will soon get live video and screen-sharing features so you have further input methods to interact with the assistant.
The next-generation of assistants
Gemini continues to take over from Assistant
Samat on stage at Google I/O
Samat said. “I think lots of companies, Google included, had first-iteration versions of [assistants], which were a 1.0 but with advances in computing, I think we are now seeing what the next iteration of an assistant can look like.”
He’s referring to Google Assistant, which launched in 2016 as the company’s first-generation virtual assistant application to compete with Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri. Google has decided to phase out Assistant and move to Gemini as a priority rather than integrating its AI tech into its original assistant.
Rival brands like Apple and Amazon are taking the opposite approach and embedding these features within their iconic tech. Google hasn’t publicly commented on the transition away from Assistant to Gemini, but the movement over the last year appears to be an admission from Google that its Assistant brand won’t be sticking around like its rival products like Siri or Alexa. It wants to start again with Gemini, and the impact the brand has had over 2024 seems positive.
“The ability to understand human language in a very natural way is one big breakthrough that shouldn’t be overlooked,” says Samat. “People communicate with ums and ahs. They change their mind mid sentence… We all take that for granted. With the advances in LLMs and Gen AI, the machine can understand you for your real intent. That’s a tremendous breakthrough that computer scientists have been working on for decades, and so that will dramatically change interface design.”
“Now is the time to make that front and center. One thing we’re very excited about is that, as of the beginning of this year, all premium Android phones have a uniform way to access Gemini. A long press on the power button allows you to invoke Gemini. By placing it there, it’s not just saying it’s easy to access. It’s saying that it is an AI layer that exists on top of your experience on the phone.”
Source: Google
Google’s booth at MWC 2025 was almost exclusively Gemini focused
I asked Samat about what he’d say to those people who have been finding the rollout of Gemini overwhelming over the last 15 months. It’s hard to avoid the tech on Android now, and that’s an intentional move by Google to ensure the world’s biggest operating system is known for its AI integration.
Samat says Google wants the assistant to be “helpful and useful”. He notes that he thinks the right move is to highlight how features can be beneficial to the user, rather than just shoving AI integration out into the world without any clear use.
“When we launched Circle To Search, which has a lot of deep technology in it and behind it, we didn’t market it or talk about the word AI once. It’s about helping you find that bag that she’s carrying that looks amazing, but can I have it in a different color? Or what’s that tie someone’s wearing?
“That’s something people can relate to. The technology is the how, which can be explained after you already love the feature. While it’s important to get excited about what’s possible, it’s even more important to make it accessible to people in simple terms.”
Why is Android 16 coming early?
It’ll launch in June rather than October
On the topic of Android 16, Samat says the company is on track to hit its self-imposed June release date for the new software. The company often aims for September to October to release a new iteration of Android, but this year it has challenged itself to go earlier thanks to a new change to the development process called Trunk Stable development.
One of the challenges we set ourselves internally is to see if we can get this out earlier
“Trunk Stable development means that everyone working on Android is contributing to the same branch of code,” said Samat. “We can build the entire system more regularly and more often. That’s opposed to all working on different branches, and then we merge them all at the end. Then we need a lot of time to work out problems and challenges.”
“One of the reasons for the original release schedule is we would do that merge in June. Then it would take us from June until later in the year to work out all of those issues. And so one of the challenges we set ourselves internally is to see if we can get this out earlier.”
This new development process has brought with it efficiencies that have allowed the company to extend software support for its older devices. The Google Pixel 6 and Pixel 7 series will now get an extra two years of Android updates compared to what they were originally meant to at launch, and part of that is due to this change.
2:14
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Samat confirmed the company is on track to hit the June release, although the software is currently full of bugs that need to be sorted. Samat says that’s often the case at this stage in the development process. He wouldn’t share anything more specifically on a release date, but we’d expect to learn more at
Google I/O 2025
in May.
The Android team has moved toward quarterly drops of new features in recent years, but the team wants to be clear that Android’s numbered releases are as important as ever. Don’t expect Google to ever move away from a model where we see a big yearly OS update.
“This year, we will do more to highlight what is in the release,” Samat said. “We know we have many fans around the world who want to understand more of the depth of it.”
“There are also a lot of users that want functionality faster, and they want us to update more regularly. We have been modularizing and componentizing Android so that we can do that. There are some fundamental changes which can only happen with an operating system release, but there are other things where we’ve engineered Android such that a component can update more regularly.”
“When we have new capabilities, the decision is always between do we hold this for an operating system release, or do we give it to people on a more quarterly cadence with Android drops. We’ve gotten a great response to Android drops because it feels like your phone is always getting better.”
Google begun a wave of extended software support with its Pixel 8 series in 2023. All phone releases from the brand since then have had a promise of seven years of software support, and we’ve seen Samsung do similar on its flagship phones. This year, at MWC 2025, Honor also confirmed it would do the same for its flagship phones, which many are hoping may mean we’ll see more and more manufacturers follow suit.
Could that seven-year promise ever extend further? Google isn’t sure yet. Samat said, “We’ll have to see. We know it’s something people care deeply about. But we’ll have to see what’s possible.”
If Android did extend to beyond seven years, it’s unlikely you’d see great performance from a device of that age, and it may be that Android has hit the upper limit of how long a phone can last for. It would be like using Pixel 2 hardware in 2025, which I’d be willing to bet wouldn’t hold up well after years of usage. We won’t know for sure until we get the Pixel 8’s final update, which isn’t expected until 2030.
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