In the battle of generative AI assistants on smartphones, Google Gemini has one major advantage over ChatGPT: it’s built into Android.
Even if you find ChatGPT to be consistently more helpful than Gemini, it’s still significantly less convenient with all the quick shortcuts drawing you towards Google’s solution.
That has changed with the latest version of the ChatGPT beta for Android, which lets you supplant Gemini in almost every way. In the v1.2025.070 beta, Android users can make ChatGPT their default — meaning the buttons and gestures that previously summoned Gemini can now call up OpenAI’s alternative.
The latest version of the ChatGPT beta for Android lets you supplant Gemini in almost every way.
For example, users will now be able to launch ChatGPT by long-pressing the home button on three-button navigation setups, or by swiping up from the bottom corner if using gesture navigation. If you have a long-press of the power button enabled for AI launching, that'll work too.
It’s important to note that these shortcuts bring up ChatGPT in voice mode, which isn’t ideal for every situation.
It also has one major limitation that it can’t be bound to a custom hot word, because that needs the kind of access to Android system APIs that is only granted to trusted pre-installed apps, for obvious, security-related reasons.
A big improvement
Nonetheless, this is still a big improvement to previous workarounds to get ChatGPT as the default Android assistant, which used to involve downloading third-party apps like VoiceGPT.
While generative AI assistants all claim to do similar things, the results can often be hugely different. There’s often no objective measure on which provides better answers, and it’s largely down to personal preference — although all AI is prone to worrying hallucinations.
In the battle of Gemini vs ChatGPT, it really is often too close to call. In our own comparison, we found that ChatGPT won 4-3 in our tests but Gemini lost the creative writing category only because it went over the requested word count.
So you can see the kinds of fine margins we’re talking about here — indeed, when we did similar tests on ChatGPT o3-mini vs Gemini 2.0 Flash, the result was flipped, with Google beating Open AI by five to three.
It doesn’t have to be either/or, of course. For its part, Apple is reportedly set to try and get the best of both worlds by adding Gemini to Apple Intelligence alongside ChatGPT.
“We think ultimately people are going to have a preference perhaps for certain models that they want to use, maybe one that’s great for creative writing or one that they prefer for coding,” Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi said, at last year’s WWDC event.
In the battle for phone-based AI helpers, there's clearly still everything to play for.
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