A new image editing feature has helped Google’s Gemini to dethrone ChatGPT as the most popular iPhone app in the UK and US.
The Gemini 2.5 Flash Image model, known as “Nano Banana”, has achieved viral success since launching in late August, with users creating more than 500 million images in just two weeks.
Google’s Gemini is now number one on Apple’s top free apps chart in the US ahead of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s Threads. In the UK, Gemini sits ahead of ChatGPT and the shopping app Temu.
When Google announced the Gemini update on 26 August, the tech giant described it as a “state-of-the-art” image generation and editing model that could do things that its rivals still had not figured out.
“A fundamental challenge in image generation is maintaining the appearance of a character or object across multiple prompts and edits,” the company said.
“This update enables you to blend multiple images into a single image, maintain character consistency for rich storytelling, make targeted transformations using natural language, and use Gemini's world knowledge to generate and edit images.”
Gemini gained over 23 million new users since launching Nano Banana last month, according to 9to5Google, with its popularity attributed to its ability to add details to existing images in a life-like manner.
“It’s insanely good,” wrote photographer and AI reviewer Thomas Smith. “Specifically, Nano Banana excels at editing existing images, rather than simply summoning new ones out of the ether.”
Some of the images created using Gemini’s Nano Banana have been shared millions of times across platforms like X and Reddit.
In an effort to prevent the tool from being used to spread misinformation, Google embeds every image generated through Gemini with a visible watermark in the bottom right corner, as well as an invisible watermark that can be tracked online.
The safeguards come after Google researchers noted a massive surge in AI image misinformation online in the last couple of years.
“The sudden prominence of AI-generated content in fact checked misinformation claims suggest a rapidly changing landscape,” the researchers wrote in a 2024 study, which called for more mitigation methods to be put in place.
