What I love (and hate)

The app is certainly more inviting, and it’s not just a visual change. Responses to Gemini prompts now weave multimedia content, including images, graphics, timelines, and videos, right into the text answers. The constant glow of the Gemini app UI fits right into the new era of Google design aesthetics, matching the new app icon redesigns and invoking the same feel as the “Glowbar” on Googlebooks.

If only the Neural Expressive design language were as functional as it is attractive. Those good looks come at the expense of utility, and in some ways, they’re a step backward.

The Gemini app’s fresh appearance quickly made me realize how outdated and bleak the old one had become. The outgoing Gemini app had a boring white-and-gray user interface with a small greeting and a few suggestion chips. The chips weren’t the prettiest, but to their credit, they gave you a quick idea of what you could do with Gemini. The chatbot’s access to specialized models like Nano Banana, Veo, and Lyria was clearly reflected by the natural-language suggestions.

Overall, though, you could argue that the old Gemini app design was bland and overcrowded. Underneath the text field, you had buttons for attachments, tools, models, dictation, and Gemini Live. Near the top, you had the sidebar, temporary chats, and the Google account and settings page.

Switching to the new Neural Expressive design language for the Gemini app presents a completely different experience. Colors and glow are at the forefront, with a blue-and-white gradient making up the homepage. The greeting is larger and centered, with the colorful Gemini logo above it. The suggestion chips are gone, and so are a few of the buttons. Neural Expressive detaches the text field from your Android keyboard, letting it float on the homepage in a pill-shaped UI element.

The “expressive” part of the design language becomes apparent when you type a prompt and send it off to Gemini. While the chatbot thinks, the entire top half of the app starts glowing in a gradient that cycles through the Gemini icon’s colors. It’s a different way of letting the user know the model is working. In the old version of the app, there was a small Gemini loading icon that spun while the models processed your query.

The responses can include richer multimedia content as part of the Neural Expressive redesign. There’s better support for different font sizes and headings to naturally break up text. You might see images or graphics mixed into Gemini responses, which now appear more like articles than raw-text LLM outputs. However, I found that I needed to specifically ask Gemini to show me visuals in responses, and I didn’t see them appear automatically.

The most impressive upgrade might be the new Gemini Live experience. Starting a continuous chat with Gemini Live in the old app felt detached from the regular chatbot user interface. In order to see or copy the transcript of a Gemini Live conversation, you had to end the continuous chat. The new look collapses the dynamic Gemini Live visuals into a small pill at the bottom of the screen, showing Gemini’s spoken responses in plain text in the open space. Users can now view, copy, or share spoken Gemini Live responses without ending the chat, making the entire experience much smoother.

While Gemini Live makes the most of Neural Expressive to upgrade the feature’s looks and functionality, the text-based Gemini experience’s fresh appearance seems to come at the expense of utility.

I’ve readily admitted that the old Gemini user interface had too much clutter, but I’m not sure Neural Expressive is the right solution. It consolidates buttons and features into a clean homepage, which might even trip up power users. The issues are apparent in the text field — there are just three buttons now. There’s a “+” icon, a dictation button, and a Gemini Live button. Looking at the broader homepage design, the Google account and settings menu are also missing.

It’s not immediately clear where any of these missing utilities were relocated. After playing around with the Neural Expressive interface, you’ll realize that tools and attachments have now been combined under the “+” menu. But does this make for an intuitive design that a new Gemini user can quickly learn? I think not, because the “+” symbol is most commonly associated with attachments. Hitting that button to use the Create image, Create video, Canvas, Deep research, or Guided learning tools just doesn’t make sense.

Google didn’t solve the clutter problem the old Gemini app had; it merely moved the clutter to a new place. Now, the combined attachments and tools menu is overstuffed with options, including the Personal Intelligence toggle. The result is having to scroll horizontally to choose between supported attachment types, because they don’t all fit in the crowded selection page at once.

Even the sidebar feels overwhelmed by options. It now includes buttons for New chat, Search chats, Images, Videos, and Library, as well as sections for Notebooks and Recents. Scroll down, and you’ll see the new home for your Google account and Gemini app settings.

I’m hoping Google will quickly adjust the Neural Expressive homepage to address these issues. It already fixed one of my gripes. When the new Android app first began rolling out on Monday, May 18, the model picker was only identifiable by a small chevron near the sidebar button (shown in a screenshot above). Now, the chevron dropdown shows the model you’re currently using, making it clear that this is the new home for the model picker.

Make similar changes to the combined attachments and tools menu, and Neural Expressive could be perfect.

As this appears to be a server-side rollout, I’ve been able to use the new Neural Expressive design language and the old Gemini app user interface side-by-side on different Android phones. There’s no doubt which one looks better — it’s the fresh Neural Expressive app by a mile. But in terms of functionality and utility, I consistently find myself wanting to use the old app.

The minimal homepage redesign is just a facade, and all the options are consolidated and buried behind new menus and pages. It’ll make it harder for new Gemini users to figure out the Android app, because it’s not as obvious where things are. The Gemini Live experience was upgraded to become more stylish and more functional, and I wish the main Gemini homepage got the same treatment.