Google and Samsung have publicly had a good working relationship in recent years. In 2021, the two companies teamed up to relaunch wearable Android with Wear OS 3, which debuted on the Galaxy Watch 4 series. Early last year, with the launch of the Galaxy S24 series, Samsung announced Google’s Circle to Search alongside its new suite of Galaxy AI features. For a couple of months, Circle to Search was exclusive to the Pixel 8 and the Galaxy S25.
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This week’s Galaxy S25 launch also talked up some (mostly) new Google features. Samsung highlighted Circle to Search’s ability (that debuted last August) to search for songs, framing it as a “multimodal” upgrade. More interestingly, Samsung’s introducing new Gemini integrations on the S25 family that allow Google’s AI to take action inside Samsung’s apps. Gemini will also be the default function of the S25’s power button, unseating Bixby as the default assistant on Samsung’s latest phones. Galaxy S25 preorders even come with a six-month Gemini Advanced trial. Take a seat, Galaxy AI — Gemini can’t be stopped.
Welcome to Compiler, your weekly digest of Google’s goings-on. I spend my days as Google Editor reading and writing about what Google’s up to across Android, Pixel, and more, and sum it up right here in this column. This is the Google news you need to understand this week.
The Galaxy S25 is a bigger Gemini booster than the Pixel 9
Google got a lot of attention at Galaxy Unpacked. Last week, I wrote about how Gemini is going to be everywhere this year — and while we didn’t get the rumored Hey Gemini wake word we thought we might at the S25 event, Samsung’s latest phones are still looking to be a significant vector for Google’s AI services.
The S25 series mapping Gemini to the power button by default is a particularly big deal. It’s an honor the Google Assistant never enjoyed. You could map Assistant to the power button on older Galaxy phones, but doing so required tinkering with Good Lock — which I think is safe to say is something most normal Samsung users don’t do (if you’re reading this, you’re likely not an average user).
Any function mapped to the power button that’s not the power menu is going to benefit from a lot of accidental activations, too. Yes, Samsung has officially renamed it the side button, but we’re all still thinking of it as a power button. More than a few S25 users are going to stumble onto Gemini while they’re trying to power down or restart their phones.
The S24 series sold something like 35 million units last year, a substantial increase from S23 sales numbers the year before. The S25 is another iterative update from Samsung, and we can’t know how many units Samsung will move before the S26 shows up next year. But given that Gemini is preinstalled and prominently positioned, it’s a safe bet that more people will experience Google’s AI on the S25 than on any Pixel phone: Google’s not as forthcoming with its sales figures, but in all of 2023, the company shipped 10 million phones total — a record for Pixel, at the time.
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The S25 is also going to be a big deal for Gemini Advanced: preorders come with a six-month trial of Google’s paid AI experience. The deal’s obviously not as generous as Google’s free year of Advanced with Pixel 9 Pro purchases, but still, it’ll lead to a significant influx of Advanced users, at least in the short term. It’s hard to track down global preorder numbers for last year’s S24 phones, but the S25’s preorder bonus could net millions of new Gemini Advanced subscriptions (last year, people preordered 1.21 million Galaxy S24 phones just in Korea).
New integrations for Samsung’s stock apps that’ll let Gemini do things like create events in Samsung Calendar or make new tasks in Samsung Reminder should also go a long way in spurring Gemini use on Samsung devices. You’ll be able to ask Gemini to do things like round up a list of specific restaurants in a given area and then save them as a list in Samsung Notes — fancy.
Samsung’s doing its own AI thing, too
Samsung’s cozying up to Gemini is also interesting because the company hasn’t abandoned its own AI ambitions. Galaxy AI is still a thing; the S25 series is debuting what’s arguably the most noteworthy Galaxy AI feature so far, Now Brief. Now Brief looks like Samsung’s spin on the long-retired Google Now, showing info like the weather, calendar events, news, and selected photos from Samsung Gallery. (This all ostensibly involves AI, somehow.) You’ll also be able to use natural language to surface relevant phone settings — for instance, you might say “I can’t hear my phone ring” to find ringer volume settings, or “my eyes hurt” to get to display settings.
Importantly, though, Samsung’s opted not to compete directly with Gemini on the S25. While Bixby is capable of activating or interacting with certain Galaxy AI features, the new “next-generation Bixby” that debuted on the China-exclusive Samsung Galaxy W25 and W25 Flip. That version of Bixby has generative AI capabilities built in and works more like Gemini or ChatGPT — and won’t be available on the Galaxy S25, at least not at launch.
As Google continues to be laser-focused on AI, to the extent that it’s creating partnerships with companies like Samsung to promote its AI products on third-party hardware, it’ll be interesting to see how it positions its own hardware going forward. Sure, Google devices still have exclusive features ranging from the useful (Call Screen) to the inane (Pixel Studio), but if core Google software features — defining software features, given we’re in “the Gemini Era” — are just as available and just as convenient to access on devices from competitors, where’s that leave Pixel phones?
