If you bought an Android phone in the past year, you have probably noticed that it was filled with AI features. Maybe you knew them before you reach the purchase, maybe you supposed (in complete safety because it turns out) that there would be a kind of AI on your new phone, or maybe they were completely surprised.
If you have bought a Samsung Galaxy S25, for example, you will have had Gemini, the circle to search, Bixby and Galaxy Ai at hand – all before you think to download the Chatgpt application. This reminds me of the first days of Android, when the manufacturers of telephones tried to load devices with their own applications, services and UIS overwhelmed in the name of differentiation. What is expanding the question: is it the new Android Bloatware?
It is easy to understand why Android phones manufacturers have hung on to the idea that AI could be a useful tool for distinguishing them from competitors. After all, most Android headlights share the same DNA: a high -end processor (usually the first Qualcomm Snapdragon chip), the latest Android software, a competitive camera system and a battery that will last a day or more. The truth is that we often divide the hair when we try to recommend one on others.
When the AI generator arrived on the scene, offering the potential to provide new experiences to mobile devices, Android phones manufacturers wanted to exploit these possibilities. Here is a new opportunity to differentiate yourself and give people a new reason to choose them in relation to a competitor. (And on the iPhone, as Apple walks slow to Apple Intelligence.)
In reality, this does not take place quite in this way – and for some different reasons. First, the research carried out by CNET and supported by the results of independent analysts in the industry are constantly showing us that people do not upgrade their phone due to the availability of AI features. Instead, the things they care about, in order of importance are the price, the lifetime of the longer battery, storage, cameras. In other words, the same exact things they have prioritized for years when choosing a new phone.
The second problem is that, despite the best efforts of certain manufacturers, AI is not the differentiating that they thought it would be. At the heart of this problem, there is barely an Android phone that is hitting the market at the moment that does not already have the most peak technology integrated there thanks to Google Gemini. Each Android phones manufacturer has its own AI flavor, but more often than not, it means that a bunch of Gimmicky features added to the existing software, creating something with a Frankenstein effect.
Early meeting advantage: Galaxy Ai
Of all Android phones manufacturers trying to make their own brand AI Stick in our minds, maybe Samsung is in the best chance. Compared to the rivals, it was relatively early to jump on the AI train, launching Galaxy AI in January 2024, which gives it a strategic head -up on which it has since been built.
Last week, he followed the launch of his latest foldables with an AI forum, during which he revealed that 70% of Galaxy S25 owners used Galaxy IA features. More than half, he added, used Circle to search. This year, he will bring Galaxy AI to more than 400 million devices.
Android’s Circle To Search Failture originally launched on Samsung Galaxy S24 and Pixel 8 phones in January 2024.
All this seems positive, until you remember that Circle To Search is a Google feature, not a Samsung functionality. Google, which makes the Android operating system, often distributes temporary exclusives to Android phones manufacturers on new gemini features, as it initially did with Circle to search for Samsung in 2024. It did it again this year with a video image generator, which made its debut with honor.
It is surely a good sweetener for Google’s relationships with phone manufacturers to be able to offer them these exclusives. But most of the mobile autonomous AI tools that we have seen the headlines are ultimately Gemini features manufactured by Google, not the work of manufacturers of individual phones, and this is only a matter of time before they become available on other Android devices – including the own Google pixel phones.
For Google, “nothing is more important than Gemini,” said Ben Wood, chief analyst of CCS Insight. It is a “strategic pillar of Google’s future”. And how better, he adds, to ensure its success than to put it in the hands of people through the 3 billion Android phones on the market (which puts the 400 million Samsung in perspective)?
Samsung could have the largest market share of any Android phones manufacturer, but when you look at its scope compared to that of Google, it is clear that Galaxy Ai, which is above Gemini, is in a competitive disadvantage.
Bonus ai
Of course, Samsung and other Android phones manufacturers will say that their own IA flavors do not compete with Gemini, but complete it. And there is a certain validity in this idea.
It is rare that a phone manufacturer is trying to reproduce something Google has already done. Instead, they are looking for opportunities to add their own ia torsion – often in the form of camera features. But if they do it well enough for this to have a significant impact on people’s decisions to buy their phone is another question.
This week, OnePlus began to deploy its own suite of AI features, announced in May, at the OnePlus 13 and 13R. These include certain photo tools and an AI content center called more mind to act as your memory for important information.
OnePlus’s natural language research in “Mental space” worked well for me.
It would be a waste of time for OnePlus to reproduce the internal features that have already been developed by Google, Arthur Lam said in an interview when the software is launched. A central part of the company’s AI strategy is to “kiss and integrate [Google AI features] as quickly as possible, “he said.
“At the same time, we must have our own proposal, our own idea of what OnePlus Ai should represent,” added Lam.
This is where the more the mind comes into play. This is an interesting first step in the company, although perhaps not as convincing as a company such as Motorola, which invests in a LAM (large model of action) – as opposed to an LLM or a large model – which will answer questions with actions, not just words. The idea is that it will use its understanding of your environment and will reduce the number of interactions you need with your phone to order a coffee or a Uber, for example.
All roads lead to Gemini
As for Google, the company thinks that it is “brilliant” that the manufacturers of phones develop their own AI to complete the rest of tools it provides them with. This is what Sameer Samat, president of Android, said Technological radar this week.
“If the features are excellent, it is more value for consumers and more innovation,” he said. “But I think that for us, as Google, we want to make sure that these two pieces [Circle to Search and Gemini] are very clearly accessible, very clearly identifiable on all the different devices that consumers are considering. “”
This is a revealing declaration of Samat, supporting the theory that Google’s ambition is to be the final boss of the experience of the AI smartphone. As Wood says: “All roads lead to Gemini.”
In the end, it is not only the scope of Google that will allow Gemini to be the dominant AI tool on Android phones, but the budget and the talent that the company must devote to AI, that individual phones manufacturers simply cannot correspond.
This means that when it comes to differentiation, AI is unlikely to be the factor that distinguishes brands such as Samsung and OnePlus. “Combined manufacturers are in danger of being left to compete more with the brand and industrial design than the characteristics and capacities of the AI,” said Wood.
Real differentiation: The Nothing Story
A company that seems to have realized that this is nothing in the United Kingdom. In the past year, I attended, in person or almost, almost all the big Android phone launch. One thing that most of them have in common is a Google representative on stage marrying the many advantages of Gemini.
When the Nothing Phone 3 is launched in London earlier this month, the company put this trend. Nothing has yet a tiny market share – approximately 0.2% as estimated by the founder and CEO Carl Pei. But since its creation in 2022, it has managed to prosper and develop on a competitive and mature telephone market thanks in large part because of its focus on design.
Nothing accent on design distinguishes it.
This does not mean that it is ignored AI, but it adopted a different approach. Earlier this year, he launched “Essential Space”, a portal powered by AI to store and organize everything that is important on your phone, screenshots to calendar invitations. It was a unique feature that has already been effectively copied by other phone manufacturers (see ONEPLUS efforts above).
Nothing uses Gemini, but it does not depend in the same way that its competitors are. “We don’t want to do the model side,” Pei explained to me when she launched the phone 3 earlier this month. “There are companies that are really good. They are very well funded and they materialize all against each other.”
Instead, nothing has built its AI platform to be “agnostic model,” he said. “When the models are improving, we are just going to the best. Right now, I think it is fueled by Gemini, but there is no prevent us from going to the last and biggest.”
The uphill battle
A flexible AI approach seems to be the safest bet at present, when technology changes minute per minute. It will be a difficult battle for Android phones manufacturers to be able to follow, and hope that their own efforts will remain relevant and will prove useful because Google invoices in advance offering the best experiences of Mobiles.
The real fight here is the same that we have seen playing in the last decade and a half: it’s Apple against Google. The real differentiation that we see in Mobile IA at the moment is between Google Gemini and Apple Intelligence, the first leading the terrain and the second dragging in its wake.
As long as Google tries to rely aggressively on its first Tour of AI while holding the Android ecosystem in the palm of its hand, the manufacturers of phones will have to do more than simply count on the AI to convince us that their Android offers is really the best of the best.
