6 ms·
The Gemini app is now on Mac
- originalvichy 6mo agoI 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).
- anon373839 6mo agoIt was always possible to store it in the browser’s localStorage, so…
- tekacs 6mo agoIt wasn't even the local-ness so much. Even if they stored at remotely it would be okay like ChatGPT or Claude but unlike the others for a long time the only way to let it store history on their servers was also allowing them to train on it. I haven't checked if it's changed.
- charcircuit 6mo agoIt still would need to go to the cloud so you can see the chat from another device logged in to the same user.
- aldarisbm 6mo agoit's not the best but I have a whole other account just for gemini. It's valuable to keep that context.
- teekert 6mo agoGoogle does not let you store your home and work address without storing everywhere you go on Google Maps. So indeed, no chance.
- exabrial 6mo ago> 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.
- nozzlegear 6mo agoI'm so fed up with _fucking_ self-updating Electron apps. Logging into Discord once a day and it opens and closes itself 3 times while that stupid logo spins and says it's fetching 1 out of 8 updates. What the hell. I actually hate Discord, I would migrate in a heartbeat if I didn't think it'd kill my WoW guild.
- NeutralWanted 6mo agoI've mentioned to my guild using mumble and irc (via The lounge) jokingly but secretly hoping they are as fed up as I am with discord.. it'll never happen sadly.
- nnx 6mo agoI ended up just using the web version, which is actually better than the native app (multiple tabs works!).
- antipaul 6mo agoSeems 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
- verdverm 6mo agoGoogle models are good, their products are all subpar
- nimchimpsky 6mo ago[dead]
- magicalhippo 6mo agoI recently discovered you can lose chat history by switching between using Gemma web "app" and at least the Android version. Simply start chat on web, head to couch and continue on phone, later go back to web and, crucially, do not refresh your browser, but resume chatting. All that lovely stuff you chatted about on your phone will be gone from the chat... Android app also loses anything you've typed but not submitted if the app is closed while in background. I guess kinda expected but also annoying if you get interrupted. I also found Gemini oddly less accurate at web searches, and less willing to do them compared to ChatGPT. Working on an electronics project Gemini relied much more on innate, hence sometimes incorrect knowledge, while ChatGPT 4.5 went and verified datasheets and whatnot much more rigorously.
- verdverm 6mo agoI wouldn't attribute that as much to the model as I would the tools, prompts, and app plumbing around them. This is where I find Google to be really lacking in comparison to Anthropic and my custom stack. I don't use OpenAI so cannot offer a comparison or opinion.
- magicalhippo 6mo agoRight I meant the experience from the apps, since that was what OP talked about. I couldn't even get the Gemini VSCode plugin to work so haven't tried that, just kept asking me to log in and saw others reporting the same. So yeah...
- xnx 6mo agoThe 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.
- verdverm 6mo agoTheir "ai-invigorated" GCP UI has been degrading substantially. It's becoming unusable and slower than Jira (which has actually vastly improved over the last several years). It currently has an expanding state problem (we suspect) because a change in one part of the UI is not reflected in the validation of other fields. Even clearing browser cache does not fix the issues. At least the CLI still works, but that is largely trad machine generated from schemas.
- straydusk 6mo agoI'm about as AI-pilled as anyone. Stitch is the only Google powered AI product I use. How are they winning?
- jsmo 6mo agoNever heard of it, seems like a Wix / Canva knock-off?
- khuey 6mo agoReally? Right now both Claude Code and Codex seem substantially more capable than Gemini CLI to me.
- comboy 6mo agoTried antigravity and cli a few times. I'm unable to handle that prodigious toddler. Are you guys able to make use of it?
- nimchimpsky 6mo ago[dead]
- Flux159 6mo agoI'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.
- shrx 6mo agoMeanwhile, I still can't use Gemini as my Android Auto assistant.
- fg137 6mo agoThis. Android feels like more of a liability than an asset to Google these days.
- VectorLock 6mo agoCan you use it as your CarPlay assistant?
- BakeInBeens 6mo agoIt is widely rolled out now and not just in the US.
- mavamaarten 6mo agoWell good for you, but that doesn't change the fact that I can't use it. Everything is a mishmash of the old Assistant and Gemini. Sometimes even my Google Home answers in the old Assistant voice (you know... "Sorry, I don't understand"
- phamilton 6mo agoI just got it last week. Still a few quirks, but positive so far.
- 3vidence 6mo agoIt seems to forget about what I do and don't have access to (in terms of apps). I've had to remind it that I have Spotify and YT music more than once. Other than that agreed going okay so far.
- gonzalohm 6mo agoDo you have an option to not use it? Google forcefully updated my TV and the normal assistant is gone now
- 1Ecz3 6mo agostill on the latest pixel phone - gemini can't read basic things.
- sayYayToLife 6mo ago[dead]
- anon84873628 6mo agoPixel OCR and translation has been fantastic for me.
- egorfine 6mo ago[flagged]
- tomhow 6mo agoPlease don't post snarky dismissals like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- egorfine 6mo agoUnderstood. 1. Can we agree that this kind of corporate tradition does in fact exist at Google? 2. Can we agree that Google has a history of treating projects this way?
- tomhow 6mo agoRepeatedly posing questions prefaced with “Can we agree...” comes across as a bit too much like cross-examination, and the guidelines specifically ask us not to cross-examine. It doesn't matter if a snarky dismissal has some basis in reality; after all, pretty much every snarky dismissal does. The point is we don't want HN to be a snarky place. You're welcome to raise the topic of Google's corporate traditions in a curious, conversational style, just like anything else.
- egorfine 6mo agoGot it and I appreciate the feedback! This comment was not meant to sound snarky (while the original one in fact was - am guilty). Sometimes it feels like polite comment will go nowhere while being blunt may convey a more focused message. Not in this case though, I agree.
- Apreche 6mo agoHow about making something we actually want, like a GMail app for mac.
- 46493168 6mo agoWhat would that get you over just the chrome version?
- xyzzy_plugh 6mo agoIMAP, for one.
- zffr 6mo agoIt would be much snappier, and would trivially support common native features like being able to open messages in new windows.
- lern_too_spel 6mo agoIt's much worse. It is difficult to customize a native app, but browser apps are easy to modify with extensions, even easier with coding agents. If I have to use a proprietary app, a web app is least objectionable.
- kridsdale3 6mo agoUse Mimestream. It's wonderful and GMail-backend-only fully native Mac App by one of the former lead engineers of the Apple Mail app.
- Apreche 6mo ago$50/year? GTFO
- sayYayToLife 6mo ago[dead]
- maz1b 6mo agoHeard it's written in Swift for this native adaptation. That's a good sign.
- samxli 6mo agoI mean. It’s not that hard to write a wrapper for an LLM connector in Swift using coding agents. They probably used Claude.
- mojuba 6mo agoThe binary is about 160MB, that's way too much for Swift. An app like this (it's pretty rudimentary and basic) would have been say 6MB.
- saagarjha 6mo agoIt's native SwiftUI with Googleisms
- qwertyuiop_ 6mo agoCould we start the count down clock on when Google will deprecate this app ?
- syntaxing 6mo agoAny way to run this on Gemma 4 only? If there was a “local” mode, I would seriously think about installing this.
- robot_jesus 6mo agoOut of curiosity, why not just try it with one of the many local managers like LM Studio or Ollama or oMLX, etc? The Gemini app is kind of terrible (apart from the models) but Gemma 4 runs great locally already.
- syntaxing 6mo agoI run lmstudio now and it’s more like a “chat” bot. Where as Gemini app is more like an agent.
- tuzemec 6mo agoYou can enable the lm studio server and use any openai compatible harness to use the models that are running inside it. OpenCode, pi, even Claude and Codex...
- solarkraft 6mo agoI’ve been missing agentic capabilities from almost all local LLM apps. It’s like they’re all stuck in 2023. That’s why I started using OpenCode for this. It works pretty well, the web UI comes pretty close to a general chat app. You can use folders to organize your sessions like projects (which annoyingly Gemini still doesn’t have) with files and extra instructions. It’s pretty powerful.
- adrian_b 6mo agoOpenCode is one solution, but there are also several alternatives. For example pi-dev, but even Codex is open source and it should work with any locally-hosted model, e.g. by using the OpenAI-compatible API provided by llama-server. I have not used pi-dev until now, but the recent presentation of pi-dev by its developer (reported on other HN threads) has convinced me that he is among the people who can distinguish good from bad, which unfortunately cannot be said about many people creating AI applications. So I intend to switch to using pi-dev as a coding assistant for my locally-hosted models, but I do not have yet results demonstrating that this is the right choice, besides its lead developer being more trustworthy than the others.
- hk1337 6mo agoMan, 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? --- 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.
- NeutralWanted 6mo agoThe best by far IMO. gemini-cli
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- mistercheese 6mo agoOut of curiosity, why do you like gemini-cli better than claude or codex? And do you have any comparisons to opencode or pi? Personally I've really liked OpenCode's TUI, but maybe on a superficial level of "this looks good and feels ergonomic to me". Gemini cli felt clunky for me when I tried a while ago, but maybe it's better now? I do like how it's open source and I'm wondering if it can be made as model agnostic as OpenCode.
- NeutralWanted 6mo agoI don't really see or feel a difference in a lot of the the cli tooling, however, for development work Gemini is just hands down better. And I pay for ultra, and while that's not cheap, I know I can just use it however long I want for whatever I want and I'll never go past the price I pay unlike some API key only models.
- 6mo ago
- hn_throw2025 6mo agoApple Silicon only. Thanks for nothing.
- decancode 6mo agoReally 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
- wallofwonder 6mo agoHowever 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.
- ChildOfChaos 6mo agoI don’t even have that in Gemini web yet. They only released it last week and are doing a staged rollout.
- linzhangrun 6mo ago[flagged]
- nomorewords 6mo agoIt's about app-ifying the desktop. Instead of opening a browser, then remembering that you have a bookmark and clicking it or googling the site you are looking for, the idea is to have a step less and just click something on your desktop or taskbar (like on a mobile device)
- tgv 6mo agoAnd to circumvent browser plugins.
- jbverschoor 6mo agoSure, but these apps are slower, take longer to start, and don’t handle multiple windows. The browser experience is 10x better
- solarkraft 6mo agoAs long as installing web apps to desktop with real app UX sucks horribly, we will remain needing this.
- chakintosh 6mo agoFirst thing I tried to find on that webpage is whether I can run Gemma models on the app with inference on-device. Apparently you can't.
- unsignedchar 6mo agoit may not be meaningful for you (the user), but usually has benefits for the provider, from binding arbitration clauses in the ToS to deeper commercial suveillance. https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/27/shit-shack/#binding-arbitration https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/27/shit-shack/#binding-arbit... > Remember, an app is just a website skinned in the right kind of IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it
- naskwo 6mo agoIt seems that I cannot paste screenshots into the Mac app, whereas this does work in Gemini running in the browser (Chrome).
- AM1010101 6mo agoI'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
- toinewx 6mo agosame experience here, way too slow compared to the web app
- HelloMcFly 6mo agoThe Windows app doesn't always (or even usually, in my experience) stay synced with the webapp, so I only use webapp now. Wondering if the same will be true for the Mac app.
- llbbdd 6mo agoWhy would it save any RAM if you already have a browser open where it just eats the cost of an extra tab? I haven't used it but I'm assuming it's electron or similar and not actually "native"
- AM1010101 6mo agoI was essentially installing the web app as a PWA. Why? This allows me to set a deterministic keyboard shortcut to open gemini, in my case super + C, as if it were a native app. Downside is that it eats some ram. I haven’t benchmarked this I have no idea how heavy on ram this really is. FWIW I’m fine spending ram on this if it improves my workflow, which it does.
- michaericalribo 6mo agoI've been clamoring for this for a year now, but I'm so accustomed to the web interface I think I'll wait until it's matured: - Can't adjust font display size - Can't open multiple chat windows at once - Can't Cmd+F within a chat to find content Hoping it succeeds, waiting until it does.
- railka 6mo ago[dead]
- klueinc 6mo agoThis doesn't even run on Sonoma.
- bibimsz 6mo agolinux continues to get no love