On Android, the public APIs available for digital assistants are more limited than the ones that Google gets to use for their own products. So if you want a digital assistant and you'd like to be able to hold a button on your phone and have it open a thread with an LLM (even if your screen is off), your digital assistant has to be Gemini. You can configure ChatGPT or Claude in its place, but then they can't manipulate or interact with apps in your phone very much. Or you can use an app like that for all of your LLM use but you can't conveniently summon it.

Similarly, you can run local LLMs on your Google Pixel smartphone, but if you want them to be hardware accelerated using the chip that's included for that very purpose on your phone... it has to be Google's models via Google's apps. So you can't say "alright, a fast, local model which sounds great, but I want one that is trained to always run a search before answering, in a harness with good search tools for answering the kinds of practical questions I often ask", you're actually not free to put that together in a practicable way.

So there is indeed some competition here. But it's not really fair competition.

I skip past them to the actual search results which tend to be much better.