How much of this is because they ended Google Assistant and had everyone start using Gemini?

Replacing what 1B people already use with worse garbage isn't growth.

Cancer is a growth.

1B piss drinkers after water companies flood water supply with piss

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.

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

Fuck, man. I hate Gemini. The assistant actually worked on my watch. Stupid gemini thought I was talking to it when I was sending a message and just responded to my message instead of transcribing and sending it. Assistant didn't joke.

Clearly neither of you read the article:

Gemini has wormed its way into virtually every Google product and service, powering email organization in Gmail, document summary in Drive, and much more. Gemini is also core to Google’s flagship search experience, with AI Mode and AI Overviews becoming increasingly hard to avoid. The 1 billion-user metric has nothing to do with any of that, though.

These 1 billion users may also be encountering Gemini in all those places, but that’s not the MAU metric. Pichai is talking only about people who are opening the Gemini app or visiting the Gemini web interface to enter a prompt or access Gemini Live. If you used Gemini only once in the past month, you are part of this cohort.

How much of it is just the fact its built into google search?

They're probably including any search result that returns Gemini output.

I reposted this post from reddit and thought it was insane they framed forced app like some natural growth.
Rage bait for sure

How many using VRs how many paying.

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.

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?

Well yes, if you entered a prompt. As it said in the article, and as I highlighted for you in bold above.

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.

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.

Paying users, right? Right???

Tagging you as "AI-pilled" and "Can't read"

You are claiming a rollout that begun in September 2025 is the sole or major cause of a MAU count that was announced in August 2026. By your logic, nearly 1 billion people are still being tricked into using Gemini months or, in some cases, close to a year after it became the default option on their device. This obviously makes no sense and I still don't think you read the article, but if you did then must be absolutely delusional.

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?

Sorry, messenger, but we'll be shooting you today

Oh yeah, I know it won't be enforced anymore. The days of regulating tech companies are gone, it seems.

With Google, you’re the product, not the customer.

Well of course, they're forcing it into every bit of the most widely used mobile operating system