Google’s 2026 developer conference doubled down on a single idea: AI that does things for you rather than just answering questions. From Gemini 3 Ultra to a reimagined Android 17, almost every announcement circled back to “agentic” computing.

Gemini 3 Ultra Leads the Lineup

The headline was Gemini 3 Ultra, Google’s new flagship model. Beyond the expected jumps in reasoning and coding benchmarks, the real story is context: Google demonstrated multi-step tasks where the model booked, compared and summarised across several apps without the user re-prompting at each stage. For developers, the model is available through the Gemini API with tiered pricing, and a lighter Gemini 3 Flash targets latency-sensitive apps.

Android 17 Gets an AI-First Redesign

Android 17 introduces a system-level assistant layer that any app can tap into. Live, on-screen suggestions, smarter notification grouping, and an updated Material design language headline the visible changes. Google also emphasised on-device processing for privacy-sensitive tasks, leaning on the latest Tensor silicon.

Project Astra Grows Up

Project Astra, Google’s real-time multimodal assistant, moved from research demo toward something shipping. Point your camera at a broken appliance, a maths problem, or a foreign menu and Astra responds conversationally with context it remembers across the session.

Why It Matters for India

For Indian users and developers, the most practical takeaways are improved multilingual support across major Indian languages and cheaper Flash-tier API access — a meaningful difference for startups building on a budget. On-device features also reduce data costs, which still matters for a large share of users.

The Bigger Picture

I/O 2026 made Google’s strategy obvious: own the assistant layer that sits between you and every app. Whether users want an AI agent acting on their behalf — and trust it to — is the question the next year will answer.

Published May 20, 2026.