Home · Technology · Sep 24 archive
Google's Gemini Gets Dark Mode Customization and Notification Upgrades
Confirmed
In Short: Google is expanding the customization options for its Gemini app, with new dark mode controls and notification upgrades.
Google is expanding the customization options for its Gemini app, with new dark mode controls and notification upgrades. In version 17.61.19.sa.arm64 of the Google app for Android, users will soon be able to override the system setting and force Gemini to stick with light or dark mode.
Currently, dark mode for Gemini is entirely dependent on the phone's system settings. The new options will allow users to choose their preferred mode regardless of the system setting.
In addition to dark mode customization, Gemini is also getting an upgrade for its notification support. The app already provides users with control over the types of notifications they receive, including Daily Briefs and regular Gemini responses.
These updates come as part of Google's ongoing efforts to enhance Gemini's functionality and user experience.
Google's latest updates to Gemini are focused on improving the app itself, rather than introducing new models.
The company is also integrating advanced weather forecasting capabilities into Gemini, with the release of WeatherNext 3, an AI model that promises more accurate and frequent predictions.
WeatherNext 3 will be used in Google's search, Google Maps, and Gemini, providing users with more detailed weather information.
Google's new model has proven to be the most accurate among leading contenders, beating out other deep-learning models from Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, and the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF).
What this adds
The new dark mode options and notification upgrades are specific to Gemini and will not affect the Google app's general dark mode behavior.
Google's focus on enhancing Gemini's features comes amid increased competition from other AI models, such as Meta's Muse Spark and DeepMind's models.
What's confirmed
- Google is expanding the customization options for its Gemini app, with new dark mode controls and notification upgrades. In version 17.61.19.sa.arm64 of the Google app for Android, users will soon be able to override the system setting and force Gemini to stick with light or dark mode.
- Currently, dark mode for Gemini is entirely dependent on the phone's system settings. The new options will allow users to choose their preferred mode regardless of the system setting.
- In addition to dark mode customization, Gemini is also getting an upgrade for its notification support. The app already provides users with control over the types of notifications they receive, including Daily Briefs and regular Gemini responses.
- These updates come as part of Google's ongoing efforts to enhance Gemini's functionality and user experience.
- Google's latest updates to Gemini are focused on improving the app itself, rather than introducing new models.
- The company is also integrating advanced weather forecasting capabilities into Gemini, with the release of WeatherNext 3, an AI model that promises more accurate and frequent predictions.
- WeatherNext 3 will be used in Google's search, Google Maps, and Gemini, providing users with more detailed weather information.
- Google's new model has proven to be the most accurate among leading contenders, beating out other deep-learning models from Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, and the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF).
What's still developing
- Like we mentioned, this change shows up in the Google app, but it’s worth noting that these new options are Gemini-specific, and won’t affect how you normally see the Google app respond to dark mode.
- But coming soon, Gemini could also start archiving your notification history.
- Sometimes, though, the latest Gemini updates are all about the app itself — and that’s exactly what we’re shining a light on today, as we check out a couple in-development tweaks to Gemini for Android.
- Remember five or six years ago, when Android fans were inundated by news of all their favorite apps finally implementing dark mode support?
- WeatherNext 3 is the latest wave of a sea change in meteorology brought out by deep learning techniques, and Google says it will start feeding into weather information users see in search, Google Maps, and Gemini, as well as being available to users and researchers on Google’s cloud platforms.
- After the ECMWF released more than half a century of weather data produced by these systems in 2018, deep learning researchers began training models that could make predictions far more quickly and with comparable accuracy to government tools.
- “Weather is chaotic, and so small differences really start to perturb massively…Machine learning targets the problem we are really solving, which is approximate noisy physics from incomplete information and finite compute, and so it learns patterns from a lot of data,” said Ferran Alet, a staff research scientist manager at DeepMind.
- Google says WeatherNext 3 is the “first” AI model to directly incorporate raw observations for a high-resolution global forecast, but the AI weather startup WindBorne says its model, WeatherMesh 6, has been incorporating raw observations from its fleet of weather balloons and other sources since late 2025.
- Regardless, both models still rely on national weather datasets to perform forecasts, so more work will be required for true direct data assimilation.
- Scientists at Google DeepMind and Google Research released a new artificial intelligence model for weather forecasting today that sees our changing atmosphere more clearly and predicts its behavior more often.
- The new model has already proven to be the most accurate among leading contenders tested on Operational WeatherBench, a utility for comparing AI forecasts built by the startup Brightband.
- Since then, model-makers have pushed on the key weaknesses of AI forecasting models: They tend to forecast over a wider area — 15 to 25 square km — than is truly useful, they’re not always great with rain, and they still depend on the formatted datasets produced by government agencies.