Google appears to be building a way to stop the Gemini app from parking its four-point star in your status bar — one of several unreleased interface changes found inside the Google app by Android Authority, which pulled them out of version 17.52.12.sa.arm64. None of it is live yet, and this is an APK teardown rather than an announcement, so treat all of it as work in progress that Google can still change or scrap.
The status bar change is the one you would notice
At the moment, Gemini’s icon can appear in the Android status bar in certain situations, such as when the assistant is running in the background. The code points to a setting that lets you switch that off. Notably, it looks like the control will run through Android’s own notification settings rather than a toggle buried in Gemini itself, which is the more sensible place for it — it means the same mechanism you already use to silence an app’s notifications governs whether it can plant an icon up there.
Small as it sounds, it is the change with the clearest consumer logic behind it. A status bar is a scarce, permanently visible strip of screen, and an assistant claiming space in it by default is a product decision made in Google’s interest, not the user’s. Handing that decision back is the right outcome.
A place for Gemini’s notifications to live
A bell icon has appeared in the app alongside search, opening a Notifications section that showed up empty during Android Authority’s testing. The likely purpose is to collect Gemini’s own alerts — finished tasks, Gemini Briefs and similar activity — in one place.
That fills a real gap. Those events already fire a system notification today, but once you swipe it away there is no obvious route back to it inside the app. A persistent list turns a dismissible toast into something you can go and look up later, which matters more as Gemini takes on longer-running background work.
Finding old chats: better, with one step backwards
Two changes target chat organisation. Pinned conversations, which currently sit inside the Recents list, look set to break out into their own section above it. And Recents is getting status filters, with four spotted so far:
- Unread
- Ready
- Needs attention
- In progress
The last two most likely belong to Gemini Spark, Google’s autonomous agent, where a task can sit in a state that a keyword search would never surface. Filtering by status rather than by text is the right tool for that job.
The trade-off is that the search entry point looks like it is moving up into the sidebar’s header. Anything that migrates towards the top of a phone screen gets harder to reach one-handed, and search is not a rare action. Worth flagging now, while it is still code rather than a shipped decision.
A Customize hub for Gemini Spark
Google also seems to be preparing a dedicated Customize section for Spark, opening on a Discover tab that groups skills and apps into categories such as For you, Productivity and Creativity. A dropdown separates Skills from Apps: the Skills view manages what you have added to Spark, while the Apps view lists connected services, lets you add or remove them, and controls whether each one can be used inside chats.
That last control is the part worth watching. Gemini has been adding third-party app connections steadily, and every connection is a data pathway between an outside service and an assistant with a view of your conversations. A per-app switch for whether a connected service can be invoked in chats is a meaningful privacy boundary — provided it ships as an explicit choice rather than something switched on for you when you connect the account.
Since these are unreleased code strings, there is no rollout timing to report, and features found this way sometimes never ship at all.
Source: Android Authority
