They tried calling it gemini-2.5-whatever, but social media obsessed over the name "Nano Banana", which was just its codename that got teased on Twitter for a few weeks prior to launch.

After launch, Google's public branding for the product was "Gemini" until Google just decided to lean in and fully adopt the vastly more popular "Nano Banana" label.

The public named this product, not Google. Google's internal codename went virally popular and outstaged the official name.

Branding matters for distribution. When you install yourself into the public consciousness with a name, you'd better use the name. It's free distribution. You own human wetware market share for free. You're alive in the minds of the public.

Renaming things every human has brand recognition of, eg. HBO -> Max, is stupid. It doesn't matter if the name sucks. ChatGPT as a name sucks. But everyone in the world knows it.

This will forever be Nano Banana unless they deprecate the product.

I doubt majority of the public knows what "nano banana" or even "Gemini" means, they probably just call it "Google AI".

And I'm willing to bet eventually Google will rename Gemini to be something like Google AI or roll it back into Google assistant.