Summary
- Google has relaunched its unique Androify app on the Play Store, this time powered by Gemini AI.
- The app allows you to create playful custom Android bot avatars, with a range of styles and appearances on offer.
- Androidify’s UI is slick and seamless, making avatar creation fast, intuitive, and, dare I say, expressive.
Back in the time tunnel, Google published an application onto the Play Store known as Androidify. This 2011-era app allowed you to create custom avatars of yourself and others in the style of the official Android bot mascot (known at the time as the bugdroid). Like other digital persona creators, this original Androidify featured customization options for adjusting clothes, hairstyle, skin tone, and more.
As time marched forward, Androidify fell by the wayside. The app received its final update in 2016, only to be delisted entirely by 2020. In 2023, Google went on to refresh the design of its lovable Android mascot with dimensionality and accessibility in mind, further distancing the company’s mobile brand image from that of the days of Android’s official avatar creation tool.
Fast-forward to now, and Google has relaunched Androidify, but this time in a revitalized fashion that leverages Gemini AI and Material 3 Expressive visuals. The search giant originally teased this AI-infused app reboot at its I/O conference in May of this year, promising to deliver a more customizable user experience than ever before.
What’s it like using the new Androidify?
The app is a joy to navigate, and it offers a surprising amount of flexibility
Booting up the new Androidify for the first time, I’m immediately struck by how pleasing its user interface is. Google has not only adopted, but also wholeheartedly embraced its Material 3 Expressive design language across all surfaces of the app, with large UI elements, confident curvatures, and uniquely shaped buttons.
According to the official Android Developers Blog, Androidify’s new interface is built with Jetpack Compose, incorporating such features as adaptive layouts, shared element transitions, auto-sizing text, CameraX, the ML Kit Pose Detection API, and the ML Kit Subject Segmentation library.
Androidify’s source code is available on GitHub. The app requires an internet connection to function, as it draws from AI models hosted on Google’s servers.
The avatar creation process itself is simple, with options to choose either an existing photo from your library or to snap a new one on the spot. From here, you can type out a text prompt to home in on the exact look you’re going for, with a simple selector tool present in the corner to change the bot’s color tone.
Under the hood, the new Androidify uses Google’s cloud-based Gemini 2.5 Flash Image model to validate and process uploaded images, in addition to a bespoke Imagen 3 AI model to generate the bot avatar itself. A ‘Help me write’ feature, which also uses Gemini 2.5 Flash, is available for random generation of text-based descriptions.
How to create your own Android bot avatar
Androidify’s user interface makes avatar creation a breeze
To create your own Android bot-inspired avatar, follow these steps:
- Download and install the Androidify app from the Google Play Store, or visit androidify.com from your web browser of choice.
- Launch the Androidify app, and tap on the blue Let’s Go button located near the bottom of the splash screen.
- Tap on Choose photo to pick an existing image of yourself or a loved one from your gallery, or select the camera glyph icon to snap an original photo on the spot.
- Tap on the Bot color button located in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen to select one of several available color tones for your avatar.
- Swipe left or tap on the Prompt tab to access Androify’s main text field. From here, enter a written description of how you’d like your avatar to look, what you’d like for it to wear, and more.
- Optionally, tap on Help me write button near the bottom of the screen to have the app auto-generate a random description using AI.
- Finally, hit the black Transform button in the bottom right-hand corner to begin generating your personalized Android bot avatar.
- Tap on Customize and Share > Customize and Export to complete the process.
Once you’ve successfully generated an avatar, you’ll be able to adjust framing, sizing, and background color, with an option to use AI to generate funky original backdrops of your liking. A separate sticker button is available, which cuts out the background of your individualized Android mascot for a transparent look.
While Androidify isn’t natively available on iOS, iPadOS, macOS, or Windows, the avatar generator can be accessed in web app form by heading to androidify.com in a web browser.
