Gemini 3.2 Flash and 3.1 Lite Spotted in Google's Liquid Glass iOS App — Quiet Rollout Ahead of Official Launch (May 5, 2026)

Google appears to be quietly seeding two unannounced Gemini models into its iOS app: Gemini 3.2 Flash and a consumer-facing Gemini 3.1 Lite tier, both surfaced for select users on May 5, 2026 alongside the company's wider "Liquid Glass" redesign of the Gemini app — the same UI language Apple introduced with iOS 26.

What Happened

Over a roughly 24-hour window leading into May 5, the Gemini iOS app's model selector shifted three times for one Reddit user — first from Gemini 3 Flash to 3.1, and then again to a brand-new "3.2 Flash" entry. A new "3.1 Lite" option also appeared in the picker — a model that, until now, was strictly an API-only product aimed at developers running high-volume, low-latency workloads. The rollout is silent: no Google blog post, no Vertex AI release notes, no @GeminiApp tweet.

Cross-referencing with Arena leaderboard data and Google API logs going back to March 2026, model strings matching the "Gemini 3.2" family have been showing up in silent A/B tests for weeks — a pattern Google has used before to validate models against live traffic before announcing them. The leak today is the first time end users have been able to pick "3.2 Flash" from the model dropdown themselves.

Key Details

• New 3.2 Flash entry in the model picker — replaces 3.1 for users on the latest iOS build, with no accompanying changelog from Google.
• 3.1 Lite graduates to the consumer app — previously priced at $0.25 per 1M input tokens and $1.50 per 1M output tokens via Vertex AI and AI Studio, the Lite tier now appears as a selectable option for free users.
• "Thinking" option appears to be retiring — instead of a dedicated thinking model, reasoning is moving to a global toggle (standard vs. extended) across all model entries.
• Liquid Glass UI shipped at the same time — pill-shaped prompt box, pulsating gradient background, and a model picker moved into a top-left dropdown.
• New Agents (Beta) tab — a sidebar entry that, for now, opens a black screen for most users.
• Naming-strategy signal — point releases (3.1, 3.2, 3.3...) instead of a jump to 3.5, suggesting Google is moving to faster incremental drops rather than tentpole upgrades.

What Developers and Users Are Saying

Reaction on Reddit's r/GoogleGeminiAI and r/Bard skews curious rather than enthusiastic. The Reddit post that surfaced the change noted the selector "shifted from 3 Flash to 3.1 before finally landing on 3.2 Flash" within a single day — and one widely-upvoted reply argued that pushing 3.1 Lite into the consumer app is a cost-saving move designed to default free users onto a cheaper tier without telling them. On Hacker News, developers flagged that the Lite model's strong API benchmarks (2.5× faster Time-to-First-Token vs. 2.5 Flash, 45 percent faster output speed per Artificial Analysis) make it a reasonable consumer default — but criticised the lack of any official communication.

Early hands-on tests by external reviewers showed 3.2 Flash generating an animated city-skyline scene in ASCII (with a working windmill and lit windows) in under two minutes — a prompt that older 3 Flash produced unusable code for, and that 3.1 Pro reportedly took up to five minutes to fail at. Reviewers cautioned this is anecdotal until Google publishes official benchmarks.

What This Means for Developers

For anyone building on the Gemini API, the practical takeaway is that 3.2 Flash exists, is being live-tested in production, and is likely days or weeks away from a public release on Vertex AI and Google AI Studio. Teams running heavy workloads on 3.1 Flash should watch the Vertex AI release notes for an official announcement and plan a re-evaluation pass — Google's own blog has previously claimed Flash-Lite tiers cost roughly one-tenth of full Flash with comparable quality on translation and content-moderation tasks. The bigger signal is the apparent retirement of the "Thinking" model in favour of a per-request reasoning toggle: client SDKs that hard-code a thinking-model name will need to be updated.

What's Next

Google has not commented publicly on the leak. Based on the company's recent pattern, an official 3.2 Flash announcement on the Google blog and a Vertex AI release-notes drop are likely within the next 1–2 weeks. The Liquid Glass redesign is currently rolling out to a percentage of iOS users and will likely complete on iOS during May, with the Android app following — Android already received a parallel notebooks-on-mobile update on April 30, 2026.

Sources

• PiunikaWeb — Gemini 3.2 Flash and 3.1 Lite spotted (May 5, 2026) — primary report from Dwayne Cubbins documenting the iOS rollout
• NPowerUser — Gemini 3.2 Flash Spotted in Leaked iOS App Build — corroborating screenshots and naming-strategy analysis
• 9to5Google — Gemini app getting full redesign (May 3, 2026)
• Google Blog — Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite preview — official background on the Lite tier's pricing and benchmarks
• Artificial Analysis — Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite benchmarks
• Geeky Gadgets — Gemini 3.2 Flash on LM Arena — Arena-leaderboard sightings