Google's no longer going to force everyone off Assistant by the end of the year

Right now, Google Home users are starting to experience the transition to Gemini, but for all our mobile devices, the ball got rolling on the big Gemini switch months and months ago. Back in March, Google announced its plans to replace Assistant on nearly all Android phones with Gemini by the end of 2025. With the year now rapidly drawing to a close, Google’s got an update on those plans for us.

Although the initial plan was to stop giving Android users a choice between Assistant and Gemini by the year’s end, and mandate Gemini on all phones that met its hardware and software requirements, Google now shares that this deadline has been relaxed:

We’re adjusting our previously announced timeline to make sure we deliver a seamless transition, and will continue our work to upgrade Assistant users to Gemini on mobile devices into 2026. We’ll share more details on our plans in the coming months.

Rather than rushing to push everyone over to a Gemini experience that may still need a little fine-tuning, Google is instead giving itself a bit more time to move all the Assistant-using devices it can to Gemini. The company isn’t sharing a precise deadline for when we might expect this to happen, but there’s now no longer any end-of-2025 sword hanging over the effort’s head.

It’s worth reiterating that we’re specifically talking Assistant and Gemini on mobile devices here; none of this affects Google’s work with Gemini for Home. This is about your phone, your smartwatch, your earbuds.

We’ve still got some questions about what Assistant is going to look like further down the road on older and lower-power devices that can’t support Gemini, but especially with Google pushing its timetable back like this, we may have to wait even longer before that picture fully becomes clear.