The future of Android is here, and it looks a lot like Gemini Intelligence. But, as with most paradigm shifts, there’s a catch: the looming hardware requirements are already leaving plenty of phones behind. Starting with a minimum of 12GB of RAM, many affordable devices simply won’t make the cut — including Google’s own budget-friendly Pixel 10a.
The bigger issue, though, is Google’s on-device AI stack. Gemini Intelligence relies on the tiny but mighty Nano v3 on-device model. According to Google’s ML Kit support documentation, the Pixel 10 is currently the only Google-branded series that supports it. The Pixel 9 lineup — and seemingly everything older — is stuck on Nano v2.
