Gemini overlay crowding your phone screen? This nifty gesture could soon come to your rescue

Google has been working to make Gemini more useful, even when it’s running in the background. A few months ago, we learned it was testing new ways to let Gemini work without hogging space at the top of the screen, plus the option to offload tasks to Spark even without opening the app fully, which was spotted recently. Now, we’re seeing more behind-the-scenes work to make Gemini work offstage.

In version 17.58.13 of the Google app, the tech giant appears to be testing a new animation that shrinks Gemini overlays into small icons similar to message bubbles. While some users have already been seeing a “Minimize” button above the overlay, the new animation minimizes the chat by swiping the usable area on the overflow to the side.

For now, swiping right or left minimizes the chat, and no other actions, such as closing the chat, are assigned to this gesture. We don’t know whether that will be the case in the future, but we hope it will, especially since swiping to the side is much more convenient than the current gesture of pulling down from the grab handle. Admittedly, though, just swiping on the navigation bar (or tapping the home button if you’re old-school and still use buttons for navigation) is much easier than either.

Just like a bubble, tapping the bubble with a Gemini icon expands the chat back into its shape.

We don’t know when Google will bring this gesture to Gemini, but we’ll let you know when it does.