Indian users have become the world’s leading adopters of Google’s Nano Banana image generation model, driving the company’s Gemini app to the top of global app store charts through creative local applications.
The country accounts for the highest usage of the AI model, officially known as Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, with users creating distinctive content including retro Bollywood portraits and traditional saree imagery, reports TechCrunch.
David Sharon, multimodal generation lead for Gemini Apps at Google DeepMind, revealed India’s dominance during a media session this week. The model’s popularity has propelled Gemini to number one positions on both the App Store and Google Play in India, with the app also topping global charts according to Appfigures data.
Download figures demonstrate India’s enthusiasm for the technology. The country recorded 15.2 million Gemini app downloads through August this year, compared with 9.8 million in the United States. Daily downloads surged following the Nano Banana release on 1st September, peaking at 414,000 installations on 13th September, representing a 667% increase.
Indian users have developed unique creative trends not seen elsewhere, including generating vintage-style portraits inspired by 1990s Bollywood aesthetics and creating images of themselves wearing traditional Indian attire. Another local phenomenon involves users placing themselves in front of international landmarks such as Big Ben and British telephone boxes.
“We saw a lot of that in the beginning,” Sharon noted regarding the landmark trend.
The creative applications extend beyond static images. Indian users employ Google’s Veo 3 AI video model to animate historical family photographs, while others experiment with time-travel effects and miniature figurine representations.
Despite leading downloads, India contributes just 1.5% of Gemini’s estimated $6.4 million global consumer spending, compared with the United States’ 35% share. However, Indian in-app purchases posted 18% month-over-month growth in early September, exceeding the 11% global average.
Privacy concerns have emerged around users uploading personal photographs for AI transformation. Google addresses these issues through visible diamond-shaped watermarks on generated images and embedded SynthID markers for content identification.
“This is still day one, and we’re still learning, and we’re learning together,” Sharon acknowledged when discussing potential improvements to the platform.
Google plans to launch a consumer-facing detection tool allowing users to verify whether images were AI-generated, currently testing the technology with researchers and experts.
