Gemini's branding clutter shows an industry-wide UX problem

Google’s pitch for its updated Gemini app is that it can handle a variety of tasks through voice commands alone. Yet inside the app, users still switch between chat, Spark, and Daily Brief — three separate features, each with its own icon and place in the navigation — clutter that suggests Gemini is still searching for a single feature that defines it.

Daily Brief is a case in point: pitched as an AI-enabled agenda offering “proactive, personalized updates” pulled from apps like Gmail and Calendar, it can’t reliably distinguish urgent, actionable information from unsolicited nudges — prompting users to continue chatbot research or resurfacing old Google searches feels intrusive rather than helpful, even when the underlying topic (say, college scholarships or animal rescues) is harmless.

Spark has the opposite problem: it’s one of Gemini’s more genuinely useful features, an AI agent that can take action on a user’s behalf, but Google has packaged it as its own standalone brand rather than folding it invisibly into the assistant. A mainstream user shouldn’t need to know which “side” of an AI app handles a given request.

The pattern isn’t unique to Google. The AI industry broadly exposes its internal architecture to users instead of hiding it behind a simple interface: people must decide whether to “chat” with Anthropic’s Claude or “Cowork” with it — modes that, until this week, didn’t even share a memory of past conversations — while ChatGPT asks users to swap between “Chat” and “Work.” Apple’s comparatively low-key approach to Siri, layering intelligence into existing tools like Spotlight Search, Photos and the camera without demanding a new interface, may be why it wins over consumers who don’t want to learn new modes.

That same principle may explain the rise of text-based AI assistants — services like Poke, Ollie, Lindy, Orchid, Lucas, Folk, Tomo and Instinct, where users simply text a chatbot and it does what’s asked. “People don’t want to open an app every time they need help — they want a contact they can text like a friend. And the gold standard is iMessage,” a16z investment partner Justine Moore said.

Why it matters

As AI companies compete on capability, the products that win consumer attention may be the ones that hide their internal engineering rather than turn it into a navigation bar.