Google, Gemini and Android 2026: what happened and why it matters

The 2026 model strategy combines capability and cost. In March came Gemini Embedding 2, which unifies text, images, video, audio and documents in a single numerical space, useful for search and retrieval systems. In May Google presented Gemini Omni, described as its first native any-to-any model, and Gemini 3.5 Flash, built to cut the cost of enterprise AI. API access to Omni was announced for a few weeks later.

According to Google, a company processing around a trillion tokens a day could save more than a billion dollars a year by moving 80% of its workload to Gemini 3.5 Flash alongside other advanced models. That is the company's own claim, not an independent measurement. Across the ecosystem, Gemini reached about four million General Motors vehicles and the Gemini Enterprise Agent platform also supported Anthropic's Claude models, a sign that Google accepts a multi-vendor world.

The series culminates in October with Gemini 4 Argon, a frontier model for long workflows that supports up to 1 million output tokens and is deployed first for cyber defense before a wider commercial launch.

Google also bet on open, local AI. Gemma 4 arrived in April in four sizes, from mobile devices to workstations, with a 31B dense model and a 26B mixture-of-experts model with 256K-token windows. The most relevant change for businesses is the Apache 2.0 license, which removes usage restrictions and Google's ability to change the terms unilaterally. In June Gemma 4 12B followed, aimed at laptops with 16GB of memory and able to handle text, images and audio.

On the same efficiency line, Google Research presented TurboQuant in March, an algorithm that compresses the key-value cache and would cut the memory large language models need by up to six times. The market reacted within hours, with falls in Micron, Western Digital and SanDisk. The reaction deserves caution: the proposal is technical and its real effect on memory demand will depend on how widely it is adopted.

Infrastructure is where Google insists on not depending on anyone. In April it unveiled two eighth-generation TPUs: the 8t for training, with clusters of up to 9,600 chips, and the 8i for inference. It was also negotiating with Marvell to become a third design partner alongside Broadcom and MediaTek, and the press read the push for its own silicon as a bid to compete with Nvidia.

First-quarter results support the investment cycle: Alphabet reported $109.9 billion in revenue and 63% growth at Google Cloud, which reached $20.02 billion, with a backlog above $460 billion. It also raised annual capital-spending guidance to between $180 billion and $190 billion, acknowledging a near-term compute constraint. And Google was reported to be preparing up to $40 billion for Anthropic, which the press read as an admission that Gemini alone is not enough for the enterprise market.

Security took up much of the year. On Android, Google expanded the anti-theft features of Android 16 and later, added intrusion logging to investigate sophisticated spyware, and hardened the Pixel 10 modem with Rust after Project Zero showed remote code execution was possible. Google Play blocked more than 1.75 million policy-violating apps in 2025 and banned more than 80,000 developer accounts, while Play Protect scans 350 billion apps a day.

The other front is threats against users and developer tools. Malicious Chrome extensions surfaced, including the CrashFix campaign, and Google reported that malicious prompt-injection attempts against web-browsing agents rose 32% between November 2025 and February 2026. Critical flaws in Gemini CLI were fixed, one with a CVSS score of 10. Google also moved its post-quantum migration to 2029 and sued a group that, according to the complaint, used Gemini to build 9,000 fake sites.

On the institutional side Google mixed defense with expansion. It appealed the decision on search distribution and asked to pause remedies that would require sharing search data and providing syndication services to competitors, arguing users pick Google by preference.

On the Pentagon, coverage varies: in mid-April talks were reported in which Google proposed clauses against mass surveillance and unsupervised autonomous weapons; at the end of the month another report described a classified deal for any lawful government purpose, without the restrictions that left Anthropic out, despite a letter from more than 560 employees. Meanwhile Google invested in education, with free AI training for 6 million US teachers and a professional certificate, and faced a public debate on how much AI is really used inside the company.