Google's Gemini App Passes 1 Billion Monthly Users, Fastest-Growing Product in Company History

Google's Gemini app has surpassed 1 billion monthly active users, CEO Sundar Pichai announced Tuesday, calling it "our fastest growing product ever, and our 14th to hit the 1B-user mark." The milestone, confirmed in a company blog post the same day, places Google's assistant in direct contention with OpenAI's ChatGPT, which crossed 1 billion weekly users earlier this year, and lands hours before Google's Made by Google event, where the Pixel 11 lineup is expected to be built around Gemini integration.

A Steep 15-Month Climb

The growth curve, assembled from Google's own disclosures, shows how quickly the number moved: 400 million monthly users at Google I/O in May 2025, 650 million by the October 2025 earnings call, 750 million in February 2026, more than 900 million at I/O in May, and above 950 million in Alphabet's July 22 earnings report — with the billion landing roughly three weeks later.

Google says more than 100 million of Gemini's monthly users are on iOS, where the app must be downloaded manually, and that voice now carries 63 percent of traffic. Users generate around 150 million images with Gemini every day, and one in five Gemini Live sessions involves camera or screen sharing. The count is specific to the Gemini app — Google's separate AI Mode in Search has independently crossed 1 billion monthly users, and AI Overviews reach more than 2.5 billion people a month.

Engagement Gap Remains

The milestone comes with caveats. Google has not disclosed how many of the billion users pay, with subscription tiers ranging from $7.99 a month for Google AI Plus to $100 a month for Google AI Ultra, and engagement trails ChatGPT: about 100 minutes per user per month versus roughly 215 minutes for OpenAI's app, according to industry estimates cited by The Economic Times. Ars Technica notes Android default placement and bundling across Search, Workspace and Chrome gave Gemini distribution no other AI assistant can match, while Google's broader consumer AI push has had stumbles, including an Earth imaging tool pulled a day after launch earlier this month.

The announcement also caps a busy fortnight for the AI unit: Google reorganized its AI division a week ago, and the company raised its 2026 capital expenditure forecast to between $195 billion and $205 billion, much of it aimed at the compute infrastructure behind models like Gemini, which just gained a new coding-focused tier, Gemini 3.5 Flash, AFP reported.