Google’s Gemini team is apparently sending out emails about an upcoming change to how Gemini interacts with apps on Android devices. The email informs users that, come July 7, 2025, Gemini will be able to “help you use Phone, Messages, WhatsApp, and Utilities on your phone, whether your Gemini Apps Activity is on or off.” Naturally, this has raised some privacy concerns among those who’ve received the email and those using the AI assistant on their Android devices.
Pretty sure I disabled Gemini as one of the first things I did when I got my phone. But, yes when I read that, to me it did seem like a serious overreach for something that was going to be “on by default” for most users.
How, its baked in? Gemini isnt installed on my phone but its there. Like the circle to search.
You can remove most apps using ADB. Universal Android Debloater is helpful for this, just make sure you read the comments for each app so you dont remove something you need.
Gemini is an app, I disabled that. I also shut off the key press and there’s some other places you can turn off some of the automatic AI features, and also there’s a setting to disable the “online” AI in general.
But that’s why in another comment I said, I am still not sure I turned it all off (or even if it is possible to).
You might be thinking of the normal Google Assistant
Didn’t Google replace the normal Google Assistant with Gemini on newer phones?
At least on my pixel 7, they rolled out Gemini replacement but you could revert it to the classic assistant. It was slow, none of my normal commands worked, and it wouldn’t find anything I was looking for just “answer my question”. I asked it how to disable itself and it couldn’t answer that though. You can probably find documentation online if you use an actual search engine