Google’s Gemini team is apparently sending out emails about an upcoming change to how Gemini interacts with apps on Android devices. The email informs users that, come July 7, 2025, Gemini will be able to “help you use Phone, Messages, WhatsApp, and Utilities on your phone, whether your Gemini Apps Activity is on or off.” Naturally, this has raised some privacy concerns among those who’ve received the email and those using the AI assistant on their Android devices.
Google Wave was actually pretty awesome. Google just had no idea what to do with it and it was too heavy for phones of the time.
I was at Google when it came out, I was like “sure this would be fine to use too, but everybody is on chat and Gmail and I kind of need to actually reach people…”
I think they just figured it would get dogfooded automatically because it was slicker than chat and Gmail, but under time pressure you’re just not gonna do it unless you have to.
And there was zero chance I was going to get anybody in my personal life to use it.
We used it for our dev and systems groups at my former company for a while and really enjoyed it compared to anything else that was around. When it went away, we switched away to IRC due to how easy it was to host and maintain. I actually don’t see a big overlap between Wave and chat and Gmail for how people use it, but I suspect that was a big part of the problem. The uses where Wave was superior didn’t really catch on until Slack came on the scene and had MS and Google then scrambling to make similar tools.