u/xingyeyu

1. Massive cuts to usage quotas.

The Gemini subscription quota has been slashed three times now. Originally, $20/month got you what was effectively unlimited Gemini Ultra access. The first cut came during the 2.5 Pro era, when Google waved the "we hear you" and "doubled" the daily limit from 50 to 100 — but in reality, the previous quota had been essentially unlimited. They invented the "50 uses" number out of thin air.

The second cut was completely opaque. They silently introduced a rolling limit of roughly 20 uses per 4–5 hours, with no announcement anywhere. The only way to even confirm it existed was to escalate through Google One support.

The third cut is this developer conference. With model performance in shambles and no Gemini 3.5 Pro in sight, they officially added weekly limits and 5-hour limits. The quota is now arguably worse than Claude Pro — the 5-hour cap is trivially easy to hit. Free users (and anyone who runs out of quota) used to fall back to unlimited Gemini Flash non-thinking. Now you only get Gemini Flash Lite.

Another thing worth flagging that nobody seems to be complaining about: Gemini CLI got merged into Antigravity CLI. The subscription used to have three separate quota pools — Gemini Web, Gemini CLI, and Antigravity. This rollout just nuked the Gemini CLI pool entirely and forces you into Antigravity, which has terrible UX, blatantly copied design, and is riddled with bugs. Gemini CLI gave Pro Plan users 1,000 calls/day. Antigravity gets nowhere close to that.

2. Massive drop in efficiency.

The quota issue can at least be papered over by paying for Ultra. The interaction problems can't.

a) The pinned Gems in the sidebar are gone.

I have a Gem I use to help analyze my diet — one of my most-used Gems on mobile. Previously, one tap from the sidebar. Now I have to:

• Pull out the sidebar
• Tap "Gems" and wait for it to load (slowly)
• Tap the actual Gem I wanted

In an era where ChatGPT lets you summon anything with @, Google is actively making features harder to reach.

b) Model switching.

I'm not sure what Google thinks they learned from ChatGPT here, but whatever it was, they learned it wrong.

Example: open the Gemini app. Default model is Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite. You want to switch to Pro with Extended thinking. Here's what that takes:

• Tap the model selector at the top
• Tap "3.1 Pro"
• Tap the model selector again
• Tap "Thinking level"
• Tap "Extended"

And this happens in the Gemini app, Gemini web, and the Gemini Mac app.

In ChatGPT, none of this happens, because:

• It remembers the last model you used. If you used a thinking model last time, that's what's loaded next time.
• It remembers your reasoning level per model. I set Heavy for the thinking model and Extended for Pro once, and that's it. No re-selecting anything.

This is hands-down the update that makes me want to throw my phone.

At this developer conference, we didn't get Gemini 3.5 Pro. We got an expensive Gemini 3.5 Flash. And so many features are either "coming soon," "US only," or "starting with English" — I genuinely don't understand the strategy.

The Gemini model I miss most is Gemini 1.0 Ultra. I've been a Gemini loyalist since then. Google seems to hate the "Ultra" name — 1.0 Ultra got dragged for the faked 2023 demo video, was quietly retired three months after launch, and was never given an API. It feels like Google is just toying with the people who actually root for them.