Google Gemini comes to iPhone to compete with Apple Intelligence
Google Gemini comes to iPhone to compete with Apple Intelligence
After a leak, Google has brought Gemini to iPhone users around the world
📱 Google Gemini has its own app for iPhone
🤖 It includes the basic Gemini experience with a text prompt and AI-generated answers
🎙️ You also get Gemini Live so you can talk to it and get more complex answers
🛍️ The app is available for free from the App Store
Google has released the official Gemini app for iPhone quickly after it surfaced in the App Store and was demoed early. The app comes just as Apple is rolling out Apple Intelligence to the iPhone with iOS 18.2 and - soon - iOS 18.2. Gemini has been available in a separate section of the Google app on iOS for some time, but this is the first time it’s getting its own home on your iPhone.
Gemini Live lands on iPhone
Gemini on iPhone works the same way it does on Android. Open it, and you’re greeted with a text prompt that you can interact with, ask questions, generate emails or paragraphs, and more. The UI looks almost identical to the way it looks on Android phones, which we had a positive opinion of in our Pixel 9 Pro XL review. It’s easy to use and navigate, and Google makes it simple to set up through your Google account (fi you aren’t using the AI chatbot just yet). You also get a few widgets you can place on your home screen for easy access, and you can map the Gemini app to the Action button on the latest iPhones.
The biggest advantage to using the dedicated Gemini app on iPhone instead of the Google app is Gemini Live. It’s Google’s way of letting you have complex conversations with its AI models to discuss ideas, concepts, and more.
The conversation can be free-ranging, you can interrupt Gemini at any time, and it runs in the background so you can speak to it whenever you want. You can start and stop sessions with ease, and on iPhone, Google even added Live Activities integration so you can control your session without having to hop back into the app.
Gemini on iPhone isn’t perfect. Because of the limitations Apple places on third-party apps, the chatbot can’t interact with other apps on your phone or control system settings. Gemini can interact with other Google apps, however, so you can ask for directions in Google Maps or manage your Google Calendar. Most other chatbots can’t do any of that, which gives Gemini a leg up.
Of course, Google is competing for the attention that Apple’s Siri is starting to get thanks to Apple Intelligence. Apple is plugging services like ChatGPT (in addition to its own AI models) into Siri to make it smarter, faster, and more informative than ever. While the full Siri AI experience has yet to ship, early betas seem promising for the voice assistant, which could easily give Google a tough time trying to garner users.
You can download the Google Gemini app from the App Store for free.
Max Buondonno is a writer at The Shortcut. Follow him on X @LegendaryScoop.