Hacker News

The Gemini app is now available for Windows

50 points by quysala12 ago | 41 comments

hahn-kev |next [-]

It's crazy to me that there's no screenshots on the blog post. And when you click through to download it there's a bunch of aspirational pictures, but only one short clip showing what it actually looks like. Why? Is it too hard to show a screenshot?

Sam6late |root |parent |next [-]

It is just an 11.8 MB poor alternative to the browser, it is offering keyboard shortcuts and the ability to read your screen, you still need internet connection and manually authorizing access.

zahlman |root |parent [-]

> you still need internet connection

Well, yes? Did you expect a local model?

iAMkenough |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Marketing said "let's make it evergreen" since they can't count on the Product and Legal team keeping it consistent for the next few months or so.

dude250711 |root |parent |next |previous [-]

To me as an outsider, it seems that anything Google employees do is for internal promotion; as such, no screenshots are needed, the fact that something new had been delivered is enough.

AbbeFaria |root |parent [-]

As the old saying at MSFT goes, “Shipping is a feature”.

holowoodman |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Maybe the marketing-slop-AI is forbidden from using the "execute and screenshot" skill?

throwaw12 |root |parent |previous [-]

Because app design can change, if you are showing it in the website, everytime app design changes you need to update website screenshots as well to stay consistent

ChrisRR |root |parent [-]

I'm sure given all of their devs at google, they can task someone with taking screenshots.

Or can gemini generate a script to automatically update the screenshots when updated?

throwaw12 |root |parent [-]

question would be, is it necessary to introduce another point of failure?

of course it is possible, but is this the right time to engineer that solution and make automated screenshot uploads, or connect it to gemini to upload screenshots from time to time?

sarjann |next |previous [-]

I still can't stand the fact that in order to use their mobile app you must allow sharing data for training. No thanks will close the app and it seems like they follow the same thing with their desktop app.

Outside of that, if I want to use Gemini through the browser they link allowing your data to be trained on with persistence of chats. If I don't want my data trained on I must allow them to train on my data.

For those reasons it's pretty much unusable for me.

DiskoHexyl |next |previous [-]

With the peoples' dependency on gmail (and maybe other services like drive) I wouldn't recommend any of my friends to tie the same account to a Google's AI product that may or may not get them banned for asking something innocent (or not).

And as it's trivial for Google to link all of our supposedly separate accounts, I wouldn't count on that kind of isolation either.

Plus it'll be decommissioned in half a year anyway

valdrinNereth |next |previous [-]

About time, I've been having resource usage and stuttering issues on browser from time to time (both on Firefox and Chromium). It seems a little bit better on desktop. I still don't understand why aren't they merging Antigravity - Gemini - Spark under one app though. Antigravity is still looks confusing to me.

darkoob12 |next |previous [-]

Is it still gemini 3.6? It's crazy that i still have 3.6 and if you want 3.8 you need to use API.

_fw |next |previous [-]

My biggest bugbear with Gemini is that I can’t organise chats into folders and projects.

It’s such a powerful model, truly useful for general purpose and marketing tasks… but the UX is basic beyond belief.

I literally find myself using AI Studio for general tasks as it’s a better workflow.

brahyam |root |parent [-]

they have it now, decided to call it "Notebooks"

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lnenad |next |previous [-]

What is happening at Google? It seems like they've got multiple teams building the same thing and competing for love from the higherups. Depending on who's in the lead the chosen package gets into the spotlight. It's been Jules, then Gemini, then Agy, now Gemini is back???? What are they smoking over there and what kind of a customer base do they hope to get with this.

Revanche1367 |root |parent [-]

Gemini never went away, the models and chat app are still called Gemini. Antigravity (IDE and agentic platform instances) are for development unlike Gemini (chat app), which is general-purpose. Gemini CLI was targeted at developers but was obsoleted in favor of Agy. Yes, it’s inconsistent and confusing, not disagreeing with that, but this is how it’s currently arranged afaik.

lnenad |root |parent [-]

I'm well aware but it just reaffirms that it's a cluster fuck from a product perspective and makes no sense to create such a weird segmentation. You didn't even mention Jules lol, who knows where it fits in.

Jemm |next |previous [-]

What is the point of the app if it cannot do anything other than cloud based tasks?

backrun |next |previous [-]

Interesting. I wonder if this will evolve into something closer to Codex or Claude Code, where it can actually work across files and tasks on your computer, not just act as a desktop chatbot.

esperent |root |parent |next [-]

Google apps don't evolve, they fragment and then die. I'd give this one a year or two at most.

LikelySupernova |root |parent |previous [-]

They already have antigravity for that, I can see these two getting merged sometime in the future.

happymellon |root |parent |next [-]

There will be a new replacement app to combine them, but it will only handle around 60% of the functionality of both.

All three will receive no further updates.

iAMkenough |root |parent |previous [-]

They'll launch it as Google Gravity, because the anti- was always a negative that Marketing didn't like using, and alliteration tickles your brain better.

Also, that it tries to be the answer to the "everything app" and suck up resources and positions like a blackhole, as bright shining SVPs eventually implode into their golden parachutes.

larodi |next |previous [-]

Sorry, but nobody really cares. In the objective sense, indeed. There are so many players already in this area, and Google's products in this area do not stand out with anything particularly impressive (at this moment, perhaps if they released in 2023 we'd be having different conversation).

Saying this as s.o. calling their APIs on a daily basis for work, but would never let their models touch my everyday OS.

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pverghese |next |previous [-]

Doesn't work on windows arm machines.

vardump |root |parent [-]

Did Google do something special to block Windows on ARM?

pverghese |root |parent [-]

Specifically a stack overflow bug. So the app wont start. Possibly because the app is running through the prism emulation layer on windows for arm

ogogmad |next |previous [-]

Just wanted to say that if you want to learn any hard topic, Gemini > ChatGPT. I pay for both. Don't yet know about Claude.

throwaw12 |root |parent [-]

In which topics Gemini is better? Is it ChatGPT can't handle them or doesn't provide clear explanation?

ogogmad |root |parent [-]

ChatGPT knows topics, but is awful at explaining them. That said, the v6 release of ChatGPT seems to have improved at this.

> In which topics

Graduate-level mathematics.

jdw64 |next |previous [-]

To be honest, I have no idea what kind of user the Gemini app was built for. It's just too frustrating to use

Mashimo |root |parent |next [-]

I have not used the windows app, but the android one works just fine. Same as chatgpt.

You enter prompts and images and get a respond back.

What issues are you experiencing?

jdw64 |root |parent [-]

The Spark feature's UI isn't as good as the others.

For example, I'm not sure if it should prominently show recent workload, and unless I use MCP to manipulate files on my computer, local file manipulation isn't possible. Personally, I don't think it's going to be that useful.

Mashimo |root |parent [-]

Oh, I did not even know about it. Had to search for it:

https://gemini.google/overview/agent/spark/

Seems like it's still beta.

atraac |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Why is it frustrating? I use it on MacOS every day, it's quite fine for me.

valdrinNereth |root |parent |previous [-]

Not "that" bad, but I get frustrated as well since I've got used to GUI for Claude Desktop. In comparison all of the AI stuff for Google looks a little bit confusing and frustrating imo.

dboreham |next |previous [-]

And will be EoL'ed in...one, two years?

Superbowl5889 |root |parent |next [-]

i was looking for this comment. raises question how managements work at big tech. why didn't they release in first hand along with androud and ios apps, only long-standing apps are the one that started before generative ai stepped. whats the vision here?

reddalo |root |parent |previous [-]

In case people don't know the Google Graveyard: https://killedbygoogle.com/

MathewDebugs |next |previous [-]

[dead]

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