Nano Banana is bearing fruit for Gemini.
In its Q3 earnings release, Google said its Gemini app has hit 650 million monthly active users, a 200 million increase since July. That still trails ChatGPT’s 800 million weekly, but it’s closing the gap.
Why the jump in interest? It’s largely thanks to the arrival of Google’s image editing tool — better known as Nano Banana — that became a viral hit back in August, said Josh Woodward, the VP of Google Labs who leads the Gemini app.
More importantly for Google, a lot of users then started using the Gemini app for other tasks, he told Business Insider.
And crucially, it’s bringing in different types of users.
“We’re seeing a very big demographic shift in the app,” he said in an interview.
That includes “huge growth” in the 18-34 age cohort and a shift from being heavily male-skewed to having more female users, Woodward said. Bringing in younger users is good news for Google, which has long worried about them spending more time on TikTok and other social media platforms.
Gemini has also seen an international surge, said Woodward. That’s not a huge surprise: One of Nano Banana’s biggest viral surges was users creating 3D figurines of themselves with the image tool.
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“That started in Thailand,” said Woodward. “There was an influencer who did it, and suddenly it jumped to Vietnam and Indonesia, and it was off to the races.”
For Google, bringing in users with a viral sensation like Nano Banana will often lead them to try other features and — Google hopes — keep them coming back for more. That’s why Woodward says Google is looking closely at the stickiness that comes from these moments.
Google defines a monthly active user as someone who opens the app in either Android or iOS, or uses it on the web, and interacts with it. However, it ignores very basic queries, such as a user setting a timer, Woodward said.
“I can imagine there will be metrics in the future we want to report, like how many successful tasks did we complete for a person?” said Woodward. “That could be dozens or hundreds in a day over time. That’s what we’re really geared at.”
To reach that point, Google needs to transform Gemini from an assistant to an operator. The Gemini 2 phase has felt like a bridge between these two ideas. Google has provided glimpses of what this will look like, such as its Project Mariner agent for the browser and an “Agent Mode” that is in early testing for the app. Yet many of these early general-purpose agents still feel wonky.
“There’s still a lot more to do on that. I feel like where we are, almost as an industry in some ways, is these agents can do maybe three to four or five tasks with a few tool use calls,” said Woodward, referring to when AI connects to external tools. “And we really want to get to a world where they can do 10-plus tasks, 10-plus tool calls, and excellent accuracy. So we’re on that journey overall.”
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