Google's Gemini app passes one billion monthly users

The Gemini app has passed one billion monthly users. The announcement came from Google chief executive Sundar Pichai, a few weeks after the second-quarter results, when the figure given was still around 950 million. Gemini thus becomes the company's fourteenth product to reach a billion users, after Search, Gmail, Android, Maps, Chrome, Play and YouTube.

The inevitable comparison is with ChatGPT, which hit the same mark in June this year. The gap closed in a little over a year, with one substantial difference in how the two products gathered their users: OpenAI built its base from nothing, while Google could count on pre-installed distribution across Android and integration into its own services.

The usage figures describe a less text-bound product than one might assume. Sixty-three per cent of users turn to the voice feature, one interaction in five employs live tools such as the camera or screen sharing, and more than a hundred and fifty million images are generated each day. On iOS active users exceed a hundred million, which suggests growth does not depend solely on the Android phones where the app arrives pre-installed. Daily users, the measure that matters most because it separates habit from curiosity, have tripled over twelve months.

Replacing Assistant

The next step is already scheduled. From 4 September 2026 Google Assistant will be removed from Android phones, Wear OS watches and the other platforms where it still runs, and Gemini will take its place as the default assistant. That migration moves a sizeable part of the user base by default: anyone who used Assistant to set an alarm or ask about the weather will find themselves using a language model without having chosen it.

The monthly user count remains a fragile measure. It includes those who open the app once in a month and those who meet it because it replaces a service they used before, without distinguishing the two. That is why the numbers on daily use and on which features are actually used say more than the headline. Even read that way, though, they show that the conversational assistant is becoming a mass product for Google rather than an experiment.