Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. Phones
  4. News

Google just canceled its AI Studio mobile app, and it’s not all bad news

Add as a preferred source on Google
Logo, Symbol, Disk
Google

Google AI Studio was on track to make its way to Android and iPhone, giving developers and AI enthusiasts a dedicated place to build prompts and experiment with Google’s latest models from their phones.

That’s no longer happening. In a post shared by the official Google AI Studio account on X, Google confirmed that it’s canceling the standalone AI Studio mobile app before launch. The announcement comes despite the company saying nearly 800,000 people had already pre-ordered the app across iOS and Android.

Google doesn’t want another app on your phone

Rather than asking users to install another Google app, the company says it’s taking a different direction. Instead of keeping AI Studio separate, Google plans to bring many of those creation tools directly into the Gemini experience. The company says it’s now working alongside the Gemini app team to make building apps feel like a natural part of everyday conversations, whether you’re using your phone or desktop.

thank you to the ~800,000 of you that pre-ordered our mobile app on iOS and Android — it’s clear that people are interested in building software on the go

instead of asking you to download yet another app we’ve decided to take an entirely different approach: one where apps…

— Google AI Studio (@GoogleAIStudio) July 31, 2026

It’s an interesting shift in strategy. Over the past year, Google has steadily expanded Gemini beyond a chatbot, turning it into an assistant that can research, write code, create images, and complete increasingly complex tasks. Folding AI Studio into that experience instead of maintaining two separate products could make those capabilities much easier to discover.

The web version isn’t going anywhere, though

If you already use AI Studio in your browser, there’s no reason to worry. Google says it’s continuing to invest in the web version of AI Studio, positioning it as the place for people who want to turn ideas into prompts, prototypes, or even businesses. In other words, the desktop experience remains a priority while the company rethinks how those same capabilities should work on mobile.

Google didn’t share a timeline for when these Gemini-powered AI Studio features will begin rolling out, only saying that both teams are actively working on the experience and that more details will be shared later. For now, one thing is clear: instead of launching another standalone app, Google wants Gemini itself to become the place where building with AI begins.

Shimul Sood
Shimul is a contributor at Digital Trends, with over five years of experience in the tech space.
Your holiday photos could help scammers figure out exactly where you are
AI can extract surprisingly precise location clues from innocent-looking Instagram and Facebook posts, making phishing scams much more convincing.
Photo on a holiday during sunset

That innocent holiday snap might be doing more than showing everyone how good the weather is. A new scam highlighted by The Guardian shows how criminals can use AI to analyse photos posted on Instagram and Facebook, work out where they were taken, and then use that information to make phishing messages look frighteningly legitimate.

The trick is surprisingly simple. Imagine posting a few family photos from Porto without mentioning the city anywhere. A few days later, a text arrives claiming that your bank detected unusual card activity while you were travelling in Porto and asking you to verify your details through a link. Because the message contains a detail that only someone who knows about the trip should know, it suddenly feels much more convincing. Except the scammer may never have known about the trip at all. The photo told them.

Read more
Meta and Google just got beaten by an AI giant you might not expect
Alibaba's Qwen AI model running on an Android phone.

The AI race usually revolves around familiar names like OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Anthropic. But when it comes to models developers can actually download and build upon, another company has raced to the front — and by quite some distance. Alibaba says its Qwen family of open-weight AI models has crossed 3 billion downloads globally over the past six months. That puts Qwen ahead of some of the biggest names in AI, including models from Meta and Google.

The difference is especially striking in Hugging Face data for 2026. Google’s open models have recorded around 418 million downloads, while Meta sits at roughly 227 million, according to Hugging Face’s latest State of Open Models report. Qwen, meanwhile, is becoming much more than one popular model. Alibaba has released more than 460 Qwen models, and developers have created over 300,000 derivative models from them.

Read more
Meta promised to stop creepy AI glasses videos, but they’re still all over Instagram
Instagram app

Smart glasses can be genuinely useful, whether you’re taking a hands-free photo, listening to music, or asking an AI assistant about whatever is in front of you. Unfortunately, putting a camera on someone’s face also opens the door to some much less pleasant uses. That’s becoming a problem for Meta.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri said in July that the platform was working to remove videos in which people use Meta glasses to film and harass others secretly. However, a new Business Insider investigation suggests the cleanup isn’t going quite as smoothly as Meta might have hoped. The publication found dozens of pickup and prank videos still available on Instagram weeks after Mosseri’s comments. Some came from popular or verified creators, and several showed women being approached and recorded in public through Meta glasses.

Read more