Google’s Gallery App With 1 Billion Downloads Surprises Pixel Owners With Its Existence

Back in 2019, when Google was still pushing its “Go” apps as slim apps meant for phones without much storage or RAM, they gave us app called “Gallery Go.” At that time, the pitch for this app was to give people a photos and videos app that was lightweight, quick, worked offline, organized everything automatically, had dark/light themes, and still included a set of editing tools.

Fast forward to today and the Gallery Go app is now just called “Gallery.” Google rebranded it like they did Files Go to Files, but it’s very much still an app you could use on Android for free as an alternative to Google Photos. It still has a high 4.4-star rating and has been installed over 1 billion times. What I’m getting at is that this app should be known by most people, yet it appears that it isn’t.

I was cruising the Google Pixel subreddit today and a top-voted thread popped up from a user saying that they wished Pixel phones had a regular gallery app that was separate from Google Photos. Folks immediately responded with a suggestion for them to try Google’s Gallery app, the one we just talked about. The follow-up responses to that are what surprised me – so many people had no idea this was an app they could or should be using.

That thread is only growing with upvotes and people chiming in to acknowledge that this app is new to them. Again, this app has been around for 6 years at this point and was updated as recently as January 2025. Google still supports it, in case you were wondering. While I don’t believe it seems many new features, it is still here for you to use.

Of course, because it is a trimmed-down gallery experience, it doesn’t do backups or pull your libraries from Google Photos. This app is meant to work on its own, offline, and be a bare bones solution. It still is very much that to this day.

Should you use it? I guess it depends on what you need from a media/gallery viewer. It’s a simple app, yet it does a really great job of organizing everything for you, it’s pretty quick, and it isn’t filled with AI. I do wish it had a search feature, but that probably wouldn’t allow it to be as lightweight as it is.

Google Play Link: Google Gallery

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