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Ricardo Aguilar
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Karen Alfaro
WriterCommunications professional with a decade of experience as a copywriter, proofreader, and editor. As a travel and science journalist, I've collaborated with several print and digital outlets around the world. I'm passionate about culture, music, food, history, and innovative technologies.
We now know how many monthly users Gemini has—the same number ChatGPT reaches in a week. Three hundred fifty million people use Google’s AI model, while OpenAI reaches nearly 1.5 billion. And if one thing’s certain, Google has never liked having competition.
The gradual replacement of Google Assistant with Gemini signaled clear intent: Google wants Gemini on every phone. And no, it hasn’t hesitated to spend millions and force the preinstallation of the app.
Google, Gemini and Samsung: a profitable exchange. Samsung is by far the manufacturer betting most on AI systems in mobile phones. The vast majority of these features are powered by Google, responsible for the Gemini Nano model used in One UI 7.
The agreement might seem like a classic Google-Android manufacturer relationship, but the monopoly lawsuit Google faces reveals a deeper arrangement.
Google paid Samsung to preinstall Gemini. According to Bloomberg, Peter Fitzgerald, Google’s vice president of platforms and device partnerships, testified in federal court in Washington as part of the Justice Department’s antitrust case.
He confirmed that Alphabet Inc. paid Samsung Electronics Co. to preinstall Gemini on its phones and devices. The contract, with a minimum term of two years, includes fixed monthly payments for each device with Gemini preinstalled, along with a share of revenue from subscriptions to Gemini’s paid features.
Paying for installation may not be legal. One key issue in the case is precedent. In the past, Google paid partners to make its search engine the default—something that has been ruled illegal. Since 2020, neither Google Chrome nor Google Search has been the default option on Android.
Google also paid Samsung $8 billion to make Google Search, the Play Store and Google Assistant the default on Galaxy phones. A federal jury ruled that Google abused its power with these policies. Now, the judge will decide whether the preinstallation of Gemini in exchange for money was legal.
Gemini, Gemini, Gemini. Gemini is not just Google’s AI—it is one of the company’s biggest potential revenue drivers in recent years. Although it remains ad-free for now, Sissie Hsiao, general manager for Gemini experiences, said that the company urged her team to “monetize Gemini with ads as soon as possible.”
“Motorola ‘can’t get out’ of their Google obligations and so they are unable to change the default assistant on the device.”
Similar contracts appear in the same antitrust lawsuit. Google’s agreement with Motorola (Lenovo Group Ltd.) blocked it from using Perplexity AI as the default assistant on its devices—“a gun to our head,” Dmitry Shevelenko, business director at Perplexity, said.
A lawsuit that could change everything. U.S. courts, along with Europe’s ongoing scrutiny of Google for monopolistic practices, have made Android more open to third-party developers.
If courts rule that Google can’t preinstall Gemini as an assistant, its plan to compete head-to-head with a GPT that has four times the users could collapse.
Image | Solen Feyissa (Unsplash)
Related | Gemini Live Lets Your Phone See—And It’s Both Fascinating and Creepy. Here’s My Experience
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