The Wrong Gemini On My Phone
2025-10-27
---
I browse Gemini on my smartphone using Deedum, but in my apps list, I've renamed it to simply "Gemini Client." This weekend my Samsung Galaxy A15 received an Android update. Aside from the usual UI changes and security fixes, a new app appeared right next to Deedum--but instead of being a Gemini browser, it was a stub for Google's Gemini AI service. That was frustrating enough, but to make matters worse, Samsung installed the stub as a system app, which prevented me from removing it by normal means.
Luckily, I could use ADB, an elevated permissions app called Shizuku, and a rootless uninstaller called Canta to remove the stub. But the incident highlights a bigger issue for me, especially regarding smartphones: we are not in control of our computational resources anymore.
It's often said the devices we carry in our pockets every day are more powerful than the Apollo flight computer that landed astronauts on the moon. That's a true statement, and it's definitely impressive to think about. But what can we do with all that processing power? Here I refer not necessarily to what we choose to do, but what we're allowed to do by the device manufacturers. To what activities are these computers limited, by the necessity to use apps made by for-profit businesses?
My options are all either time-wasters or expressions of hedonism. I could doomscroll an endless stream of teenagers talking about politics on TikTok and Instagram, putting my microchips to use decoding video codecs. I could have high-fructose corn syrup and trans fats delivered to my house using Instacart and Uber Eats, so that I can consume 3000 calories I'll never burn off. I could be fed videos of fake nude girls on Claude AI, ragebait on Reddit, cringe compilations on YouTube, shocking news stories on Facebook, and the latest Internet drama on X. What wonderful applications for this ultra-portable, globally-connected, space-age technology!
What if I want to break away from all that? What if I want to devote the full breadth of this awesome computing power to something productive? I'm met with stiff opposition, both from regulatory agencies and from business incentives. "Sorry, you can't remove Facebook or Amazon or YouTube from your phone. Those are system apps." "Sorry, you can't flash a privacy-friendly firmware onto your phone. The bootloader is locked by your carrier." "Sorry, you can't swap out your antennas, batteries or processors. We married those components to the PCB by serial number." "Sorry, you can't disable location tracking or get the baseband modem to stop broadcasting opaque data all the time. You need root access to do that."
Computers are only as useful as their ability to complete tasks that human beings assign to them--and their utility as computational devices only goes as far as humans' ability to assign tasks to them freely. If we can't use computers the way we'd like, then they are, in a certain sense, useless. I think of this phenomenon as being "functional but useless," also known as "malicious compliance."
The Gemini app pushed onto my phone was just a stub, so no actual code was present on my device. But that doesn't matter: the real issue is the principle that I cannot control what programs are or are not present on my device. If ownership implies control over the the things I own, then if I own a computer, I should be in control of what calculations are performed on it. Electronics manufacturers, both hardware and software, have abrogated that freedom for decades, and it only gets worse with each passing year.
The moral of the story: use free and open-source software, and preferably open-source hardware, whenever you can. And Google Gemini can pound sand.
---
[Last updated: 2025-10-27]