The Gemini app is now on Mac

I've had the gemini web app in a safari embedded browser tab for 6+months its worked great as a local app. (M1 Pro base spec) I set Super + C set to open it.

First impressions of the native app: I think I will save RAM and it will be faster - Cool. Download, install, sign in - Easy. Change the keyboard shortcuts - Simple. cmd + N to open a new chat - better than cmd + shift + O in the web app.

Back to work, a few moments pass.

super + C - ... wait ... there is a noticable delay in opening the app?

Maybe try the new mini chat? - Same delay 800+ms?

Thats annoying, every other app on my mac switches instantly?

Why is this slow? The delay long enough that you break my flow and make me think spending the RAM is worth it for the old web version? Whats the point of native if its slow?

Second grip - the text layout is too wide to read comfortably. At least give me the option to put it in a more narrow layout. I use every app full screen so reading text across the full width of my screen is pretty awkward.

Anyway I'll give it a go and see if it grows on me but right now the web app feels more polished and responsive so I will likely switch back.

Edit: typos

I feel that software like this, which has the same functionality as the web version rather than leveraging the client's advantages to do things the web cannot, is not very meaningful

I wonder if they will finally let you use past chats without having to turn on the data sharing, since it’s possible to store chat context on disk. (No chance).

Meanwhile, I still can't use Gemini as my Android Auto assistant.

However the app doesn't support the notebooks in Gemini web yet, which is very helpful for Gemini acting as a research assistant. Looking forward to its updates.

Man, I’ve spent so many years now without google, I want to try it because I want to try different agents but I don’t really want to setup google on my MacBook.

Does this have console like Claude and codex?

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I was able to install and use Gemini on macOS fine authentication worked. I had some issues authenticating with the cli app, some certificate issues.

Once I got past the certificate issues, now it will not let me use the cli code assist without verifying that I am 18+ but I can use the UI app just fine without the verification.

To verify, seems to require submitting a government issued ID or credit card.

No thanks. This kind of stuff is why I dropped google long ago.

Seems like the most basic thing ever.

Can’t even use the new Gemma on device model… no model selection besides fast/normal/thinking.

Also requires Google login

It seems that I cannot paste screenshots into the Mac app, whereas this does work in Gemini running in the browser (Chrome).

Any way to run this on Gemma 4 only? If there was a “local” mode, I would seriously think about installing this.

Really hoping this will not strip off messages as it happens in iOS apps with long conversations over days.

Have been seeing that happen consistently where older chats have some messages missing in between

Heard it's written in Swift for this native adaptation. That's a good sign.

> The Gemini app is now available as a native macOS experience

Ok Google, this is well-earned. This is enough to make me try Gemini over Claude.

I'm so fed up with _fucking_ self-updating Electron apps. One day it's working, next day its not. I'd rather just have releases once it's confirmed working, and something I can roll back if it breaks. I have work to get done, and it's like rolling the dice right now every day.

I'm going to be honest - this is over a year late. I still use ChatGPT on Mac because it actually had a Mac App from May of 2024, whereas I had to go to the Gemini website to use Gemini. It was even worse because of the fragmented experience - there's been an iOS Gemini app for a while now. Integrating Gemini into Chrome is not the same experience as having a standalone app.

Now that it's at least here, hopefully Google can continue updating it instead of giving up on it if their metrics don't show as fast growth as iOS or Chrome usage.

The amount of products and updates shipping from the AI-invigorated Google is mind-boggling.

They are leading or highly competitive in every AI segment: foundation model, open-weights model, video model, image model, world model, AI IDE, AI CLI, text-to-music, text-to-speech, etc. etc. etc.

still on the latest pixel phone - gemini can't read basic things.

[dead]

How about making something we actually want, like a GMail app for mac.

Excellent. Now the Project Manager of this app gets a promotion at Google, the team gets disbanded to other projects and this app gets abandoned. Congratulations!

Could we start the count down clock on when Google will deprecate this app ?

Apple Silicon only. Thanks for nothing.