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Gemini becomes Google's fastest-growing product ever as it hits 1B users (arstechnica.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/android@lemmy.world
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[–] 33 points 3 months ago (10 children)

This. It forced itself into just about every Android smartphone, it overwrote every Google Home product, added itself to several Chromecast models, and even auto-downloaded itself into Chrome.

None of this growth is consentual or intentional, it's all just force feeding slop onto consumers who never asked for it, and had the rug pulled out from under them on products they were using.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Isn't that basically what Microsoft got sued for? Internet Explorer, iirc.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago* (1 child)

    Yeah but in the modern economy apparently you can just get away with that sort of thing and no one cares.

    Google even lost their recent major antitrust lawsuit on the monopolistic nature of Google Search, Chrome, and other bundled Google services, after which they were forced to do literally nothing about it.

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  • [+] 3 points 3 months ago (6 children)
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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Same difference. If you used assistant then clicked on it expecting assistant but instead your phone switched to using Gemini without telling, then you're counted as having used it. But did you willingly use Gemini?

    How many people have touched Gemini by accident while looking for some other google app that stupidly uses the same color scheme for the logo? It is even stupidier and less meaningful from a data analysis point of view.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    No, I read it. What you are explaining are contexts in which users used to perform a simple query with Google Assistant, or simply Google Search, now replaced with Gemini.

    If you want to search for a product to watch on Chromecast, you used to just be able to press a button to look up something by speaking its name, and it would show you wherever you can stream it from. Now it's Gemini, it goes through the Gemini app, and it tries to have a conversation with you. Same for asking anything on Google Home. The Gemini feature of Chrome is also a shortcut for the Gemini web interface, which also downloads a local model to the user's device.

    All of that is the "Gemini App". They put the Gemini App on everything to replace things that previously did not have it or need it.

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  • [+] -1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 child)
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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago*

    Yes. Is it that hard to imagine a forced rollout is still yielding monthly growth as people replace devices or take upgrades they didn't check?

    Obviously the elderly and the dumb will go out of their way to download it directly, hence the decently large volume of users on iOS, but that population only accounts for 10% of use cases. Users of the Android app probably make up a larger chunk of that pie, but that's where we run back into the muddy terrain of whether people went out of their way to download it, or if it was just forced on them by default. My current phone came with it by default, and it took a bit of effort to disable it everywhere.

    Did you read the article, or did you just have Gemini parse it?

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