The Gemini app is now available for Windows (blog.google)

48 pointsby quysala125 hours ago33 comments

hahn-kev 2 hours ago

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?

holowoodman 2 hours ago

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

iAMkenough an hour ago

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.

Sam6late an hour ago

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 19 minutes ago

> you still need internet connection

Well, yes? Did you expect a local model?

throwaw12 an hour ago

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 an hour ago

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 31 minutes ago

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?

dude250711 an hour ago

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.

sarjann an hour ago

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.

nothrowaways 5 minutes ago

One of the most poorly executed product launches I've ever seen.

valdrinNereth 2 hours ago

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.

_fw an hour ago

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.

larodi 14 minutes ago

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.

ogogmad an hour ago

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 an hour ago

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

ogogmad an hour ago

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.

backrun 5 hours ago

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.

LikelySupernova 4 hours ago

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

happymellon 2 hours ago

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 an hour ago

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.

esperent 3 hours ago

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

pverghese 2 hours ago

Doesn't work on windows arm machines.

vardump 2 hours ago

Did Google do something special to block Windows on ARM?

pverghese 2 hours ago

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

jdw64 4 hours ago

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 3 hours ago

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 2 hours ago

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 an hour ago

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 2 hours ago

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

valdrinNereth 2 hours ago

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 4 hours ago

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

Superbowl5889 2 hours ago

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 30 minutes ago

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