The Flipper Zero always looked like it was designed by someone who grew up on Game Boys and cyberpunk anime simultaneously, and that instinct paid off spectacularly. A toy-shaped hacker tool with a pixelated dolphin mascot somehow became one of the most culturally significant pieces of open hardware of the past decade, racking up a million units shipped and a string of government ban attempts that only made it more desirable. We’ve covered the Zero’s behind-the-scenes, and the throughline was always the same: great design lowers the barrier to entry, and a device that looks fun gets picked up, explored, and loved in ways that a purely utilitarian box never would.

Flipper One lands with that same energy, except the mascot is now visibly unhinged. The screen on the press images shows the dolphin yelling “Are you f*cking mad?” at the user for drawing too much power from the USB port, which tells you everything about the tonal direction here. This thing stamps “PORTABLE LINUX COMPUTER” across its forehead, wears its network indicator LEDs like a badge of honor, and ships with a carabiner loop because Flipper knows exactly who is buying this. The hardware underneath that attitude is a full Linux machine capable of operating as a router, a network analyzer, a travel desktop, and a satellite-connected field tool, all depending on what you slot into its M.2 expansion bay.

Designers: Pavel Zhovner & Flipper Devices

I’ll be honest, when the Flipper One CAD files leaked in March, my first reaction was that it looked like someone scaled up a Game Boy Advance and bolted Ethernet ports onto it. My second reaction, about thirty seconds later, was that I wanted one immediately. The form language was unmistakably Flipper, angular and purposeful and slightly aggressive, but the proportions told a completely different story than the Zero. This was not a radio tool. The Zero’s pixel dolphin was charming and approachable, a deliberate design choice that got a hacking tool onto TikTok and into mainstream conversation. The One’s mascot has apparently developed strong opinions and a short temper, which fits a device aimed at people who want their pocket computer to reflect how seriously they take their craft.

That craft, in practice, looks like this. You’re at a conference, hotel Wi-Fi is the usual disaster, and you want a clean network environment for your laptop. Flipper One bridges its dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, runs a VPN tunnel through the cellular modem you’ve slotted into the M.2 bay, and your laptop connects through USB-C Ethernet at 5 Gbps without touching the hotel network once. Or you’re a field engineer doing network diagnostics in a location with no cellular, and the NTN satellite modem module gives you an IP connection via the same low-orbit infrastructure newer phones use for emergency SOS messaging. Or you’re traveling light and plug the One into the hotel TV via full-size HDMI 2.1, grab a Bluetooth keyboard, and have a working Linux desktop controlled by the room remote through HDMI CEC. These aren’t edge cases dreamed up for a spec sheet. They’re the actual use cases Flipper is designing toward.

The software architecture is as interesting as the hardware. Flipper OS introduces a profile system where each configuration is a complete, isolated OS snapshot. Boot a network analysis profile, install whatever you need, break things freely, then switch to a clean travel desktop profile without any experimental residue carrying over. Anyone who has re-flashed a Raspberry Pi SD card for the fourth time in a week because a router experiment ate the system will understand exactly why this matters. FlipCTL completes the picture, a UI framework that wraps existing Linux command-line tools like nmap, ping, and traceroute in a clean, D-pad-navigable interface purpose-built for the One’s small screen, rather than squeezing a full desktop environment into a space it was never designed for.

Flipper Devices shipped a million Zeros by making a serious tool feel approachable and fun. The One is a bet that the same philosophy scales up to a full Linux platform, and that an unhinged pixel dolphin yelling at you about USB power draw is exactly the right mascot for a machine with this much capability packed into a chassis you can clip to a bag and carry anywhere.

The post Flipper One Launches With 5G, Satellite, and the Ability to Turn Any Hotel TV Into a Linux Desktop first appeared on Yanko Design.

President Trump's announcement stirred confusion in Europe following weeks of changing statements from his administration about reducing the American military footprint in Europe.

(Image credit: Jacquelyn Martin)

AT&T sued California yesterday over the state's refusal to let the carrier stop providing phone service to all potential customers in its wireline network territory. AT&T is also asking the Federal Communications Commission to declare that California cannot enforce its rules and to let AT&T stop providing service to about 199,000 phone customers.

"California requires AT&T to spend $1 billion each year to maintain a century-old telephone network that almost no one uses," AT&T said in a lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Southern District of California. "The copper wires that once served every home now serve just three percent of households in AT&T’s California territory, with consumers fleeing every day to modern broadband services that are more affordable, reliable, and energy-efficient."

In June 2024, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) rejected AT&T’s request to eliminate the Carrier of Last Resort (COLR) obligation that requires it to provide landline telephone service to any potential customer in its service territory. AT&T has said it's received relief from COLR obligations in 20 of the 21 states in its wireline service territory, all except California.

"The federal government and virtually all States where AT&T historically offered POTS [Plain Old Telephone Service] have now eliminated outdated regulatory obstacles, allowing AT&T to begin powering down its POTS network and increasing its investments in modern communication technologies. California stands alone in resisting this progress," AT&T's lawsuit said.

AT&T complained that its "barely used copper network is an easy mark for criminals—California has already suffered about 2,000 outages from copper thefts this year—and drains the power grid of over 100 million kilowatt-hours each year."

AT&T won't upgrade all lines to fiber

AT&T has argued for years that California is preventing it from replacing copper with more modern technology. But California officials say AT&T is allowed to upgrade the copper lines with better technology.

"The Commission does not have rules preventing AT&T from retiring copper facilities. Furthermore, the Commission does not have rules preventing AT&T from investing in fiber or other facilities/technologies to improve its network," the CPUC said in its 2024 decision against AT&T. The CPUC said the state's "COLR rules are technology-neutral and do not distinguish between voice services offered… and do not prevent AT&T from retiring copper facilities or from investing in fiber or other facilities/technologies to improve its network."

AT&T doesn't want to upgrade all copper customers to fiber. It has told investors it intends to build fiber home Internet in much of its wireline footprint, prioritizing the most densely populated and thus most profitable areas. But in about half of its wireline territory, AT&T has a “wireless first” plan in which copper phone lines would be replaced only by wireless technology.

The CPUC in 2024 noted that members of the public raised concerns about "the unreliability of voice alternatives such as mobile wireless or VoIP." The agency said that by dismissing AT&T's request to withdraw as the Carrier of Last Resort, "the CPUC reaffirms its commitment to safeguard access to essential services and maintain regulatory oversight of the telecommunications industry."

We contacted the CPUC and California Attorney General Rob Bonta's office about AT&T's lawsuit today and will update this article if we receive comment.

AT&T seeks FCC preemption

AT&T's lawsuit said it wants to replace copper lines with fiber and wireless offerings, and that both fiber and wireless are good enough to meet residents' needs. Wireless options include the nationwide AT&T mobile service and AT&T Phone-Advanced, a VoIP service that relies on the mobile network. AT&T said that "the FCC has repeatedly found [AT&T Phone-Advanced] to be an adequate replacement for POTS."

Under Chairman Brendan Carr, the FCC has been inclined to grant the wishes of carriers seeking to ditch old networks. AT&T's lawsuit cites a March 2026 order in which the FCC made it easier for carriers to discontinue copper networks and asserted that state rules are subject to preemption if they conflict with the FCC's discontinuance authorizations and authority.

The FCC order spoke generally of preemption but did not make determinations about specific state rules. AT&T asked the court for "a declaration that any California law or regulation that interferes with AT&T’s ability to grandfather POTS, as authorized by the FCC in the NMO [Network Modernization Order], is unlawful," and "injunctive relief to preclude California officials from applying those laws or regulations to prevent or slow AT&T from grandfathering POTS."

AT&T's lawsuit said that although the FCC "granted AT&T permission to stop signing up new customers" for POTS, California's COLR "rules require AT&T to continue offering POTS even after the FCC has authorized the service to be phased out. Under basic preemption principles, those COLR rules cannot stand."

AT&T yesterday also submitted petitions asking the FCC to intervene directly in California. One petition asks for permission to discontinue copper-based service to 184,000 residential customers and another asks for permission to discontinue copper service to 15,000 business customers.

Two other AT&T petitions asked the FCC for forbearance and preemption orders that would effectively block enforcement of California's COLR rules and other phone mandates, such as a requirement to participate in the California Lifeline discount program. AT&T said it has about 40,000 Lifeline subscribers left in California, with that number having plummeted due, in part, to a 2016 FCC order that let AT&T stop offering Lifeline to new consumers in most counties.

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When the action film Top Gun hit the big screen in 1986, critical reviews were mixed, but audiences were thrilled. The film racked up $358 million globally, making it the highest-grossing film of that year. Its success spawned a few video games and a critically acclaimed blockbuster 2022 sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, and the eye-popping flight sequences definitely boosted enlistment numbers for the US Navy. Those scenes are still the best thing about Top Gun, forty years later.

(Spoilers below because it's been 40 years.)

The film was inspired by a 1983 article in California magazine detailing the lives of fighter pilots at Naval Air Station Miramar in San Diego (aka "Fightertown USA") and featuring plenty of aerial photography alongside the text. Producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson tapped Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr. to write the screenplay, with Epps sitting in on declassified classes at the academy and even taking a flight aboard an F-14.

Tony Scott, then a relative newcomer with just one feature film (1983's The Hunger) to his name, was hired to direct. But he'd shot a commercial for Saab featuring one of the company's car's racing against a Saab 37 Viggen fighter jet, so the producers figured he had the chops for Top Gun.

The film wastes no time getting us in the air. Our hero, Maverick (Cruise) and his radar intercept officer, Goose (Anthony Andrews) are flying maneuvers in an F-14A Tomcat in the Indian Ocean, along with Maverick's wingman, Cougar (John Stockwell) and his RIO. They encounter two hostile MiG-28s (a fictitious craft represented in the film by the Northrup F-5). Maverick scares one away with a well-timed missile lock, but the other MiG locks onto Cougar before getting chased away by Maverick. Just to make sure we understand how Maverick got his nickname, the pilot inverts his plane and flies directly above the hostile MiG, giving his adversary the finger as Goose snaps a commemorative Polaroid.

Cougar, however, is badly shaken by the encounter—so much so that he freezes up and can't land his plane. So Maverick defies orders to land immediately (they are low on fuel) and flies back to Cougar to lead him safely back to the carrier. That earns Maverick a reprimand and establishes him as a cocky, arrogant rule-breaker with a fierce loyalty to his fellow pilots. Despite this, because Cougar has "lost the edge" and quits his commission, Maverick and Goose get to take his place at the titular Top Gun.

Highway to the danger zone

Maverick's got the flying chops, the abrasive confidence, and nerves of steel, but can he learn to set his ego aside and be a team player? His archrival, Iceman (Val Kilmer), doesn't think so, especially when Maverick abandons his wingman in a training run to make a showy, aggressive pass at an instructor's plane. Everyone ends up failing the exercise because of it. Iceman thinks Maverick is dangerous—which the latter naturally tries to turn into an asset: "I am dangerous."

Lt. Commander Rick "Jester" Heatherly (Michael Ironside) shares Iceman's concerns, admitting that while Maverick's flying is impressive, he might not trust him in actual combat. And training for combat is why they're all there.

This is an '80s blockbuster, so of course Maverick ultimately redeems himself and saves the day in an actual air skirmish—and also gets the girl, a civilian Top Gun instructor named Charlie (Kelly McGillis). But first, he suffers a major personal loss. Maverick and Goose accidentally fly through the jet wash of another plane, both engines flame out, and they go into a flat spin that not even Maverick can recover from.

The pair eject, but Goose hits the jettisoned canopy of the aircraft, and the impact kills him. Maverick isn't to blame but nonetheless feels responsible. The loss chastens him just enough to take the edge off his insubordinate recklessness.

We all know that the best thing about Top Gun continues to be those incredible, pulse-pounding in-flight sequences and gorgeous orange-hued shots of crew and grounded planes at the base and on aircraft carriers. Scott shot most of the air footage from a Learjet, augmented by mounted cameras inside the F-14 cockpits and exteriors. That's why he shot the whole thing in Super-8: The larger anamorphic lenses wouldn't fit in the cockpits. The US Navy supplied aircraft, carriers, and crews, and the flight deck footage captured normal operations, with nothing staged.

The stunt pilots included future NASA astronaut Scott Altman, who performed the aforementioned infamous "flipping the bird" maneuver and the tower-buzzing moments. There was one casualty: aerobatic pilot Art Scholl, who performed a lot of the in-flight camera work. Scholl fell afoul of the flat spin maneuver; he couldn't recover and crashed his biplane into the Pacific Ocean near Carlsbad, California. Neither his body nor the plane was ever recovered, but Scott dedicated the film to Scholl.

From rebel to hero

The film's weaknesses are... well, almost everything else.

Confession: I've never been a huge Cruise fan, particularly in his early career. He didn't really come into his own until much later; Tropic Thunder, Minority Report, Edge of Tomorrow, and Magnolia are my favorite of his roles, and he acquitted himself admirably in the excellent Top Gun: Maverick.

I still find his performance in the original abrasive and insincere. It takes skill as an actor to make a character like Maverick genuinely likable, and Cruise was not at that level yet in the mid-'80s, coasting on his boyish good looks instead. The film tries to include some vulnerable moments to show the sensitive soul lurking behind the swagger, mostly in scenes with Charlie, but it's a shallow sentimentality and not very effective. The uninspired dialogue doesn't help.

As for Charlie, the character started out as an aerobics instructor in the earliest script drafts and was then changed from a fellow officer to a civilian contractor/astrophysicist at the Navy's request—otherwise, her romance with Maverick would count as fraternization. (The character was inspired by mathematician Christine "Legs" Fox, a civilian specialist in tactical development for aircraft carrier defense at Miramar.)

But while it might not be fraternization—and the film takes pains to show Charlie giving a brutally objective assessment of Maverick's piloting despite their involvement—sleeping with a student is certainly unprofessional and would probably have gotten her fired in real life. So this is a very dated Hollywood depiction of a female career scientist.

Equally dated is the famous bar scene where Maverick, Goose, and several other drunken officers serenade Charlie—not yet introduced as their instructor—with "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling" because they've made a bet that Maverick can seduce her. It's supposed to be charming, but the scene plays more aggressively in 2026, particularly when Maverick literally follows Charlie to the ladies' room, leers at her, and suggests that they could do it right there on the sink.

She shoots him down, and he deserves it. The scene was even problematic 35 years ago—the US Department of Defense Office of Inspector General cited Top Gun's influence as a contributing factor in the 1991 Tailhook scandal.

Top Gun also has its fair share of technical errors and Navy protocol violations, despite the best efforts of technical advisor Rear Admiral Pete "Viper" Pettigrew—depicted by Tom Skerritt in the film as CDR Mike "Viper" Metcalf. But one expects that in a Hollywood blockbuster. If you want verisimilitude, I highly recommend the National Geographic documentary series, Top Guns: The Next Generation.

Much like C.S.I. did for forensics and The X-Files' Dana Scully did for the FBI, Top Gun (and Top Gun: Maverick) are still the best recruitment tools the US Navy could hope for, on the strength of that glorious aerial footage alone. Just be prepared to do the actual hard work if the films inspire you to become a fighter pilot.

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On Wednesday, Zillow abruptly lost access to thousands of property listings in the Chicago area after filing a lawsuit accusing a private listing network owner of colluding with the nation's largest brokerage to harm consumers by hiding homes.

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, hopeful Chicagoland home buyers browsing Zillow and Trulia suddenly saw significantly fewer listings. On Zillow, a nearly 5,000-home market dropped to about 1,700.

Thorough home buyers diligently checking every possible resource can still turn to other platforms, like Redfin and Realtor.com, which currently host between 5,000 and 8,000 listings, the Sun-Times noted.

But in an antitrust lawsuit filed last week, Zillow claimed that everybody buying or selling a home will be harmed if the alleged collusion goes unchecked.

Specifically, Zillow alleged that Midwest Real Estate Data LLC (MRED) and Compass, two "powerful players in the real estate industry," have conspired to create "barriers to information that harm or threaten harm to sellers, buyers, and competitors by hiding real estate listings behind a velvet rope in a Private Listing Network (PLNs)."

As Zillow has alleged, MRED—Chicago's multiple listing service (MLS) provider—"entered into a conspiracy" with Compass—Chicago's dominant brokerage—to block platforms like Zillow from taking steps to increase transparency of available listings in the area.

"Rather than share all of its listings transparently—as its competitors do—Compass has sought to anticompetitively benefit from its dominance by hiding listings from anyone who is not working with a Compass agent in a PLN," Zillow's complaint alleged.

This allegedly "allows Compass to lure prospective home buyers to its brokerage with the promise of access to listings hidden behind a registration wall" and then maximize opportunity for profit by engineering "deals where its agents represent both sides of the transaction."

In a statement to Ars, Zillow said that "Chicagoland home buyers and sellers today have far worse access to the housing market than they had yesterday, because their local MLS decided one mega-brokerage's profits mattered more than their ability to achieve the American Dream."

Zillow has requested a preliminary injunction to end the suppression of listings and other unlawful attempts to allegedly manipulate the home buying market to disadvantage platforms that are pushing for more transparency.

Firms defend private listings

Challenging that, MRED has recently moved to force the legal fight into arbitration, alleging that Zillow's antitrust claims are "meritless" and amount to little more than a contract dispute. The company also claimed that Zillow's alleged harms are "self-inflicted," since the platform knew that choosing to block nine listings of previously hidden homes would trigger a violation cutting off access to 43,000 listings.

In a press release, MRED said that Zillow lost access to its listings due to breaching its contract. The company also criticized Zillow, writing that "in a striking lesson in irony, Zillow has chosen not to display 43,000 MRED listings because it demands the right, and has filed a federal antitrust lawsuit to secure that right—to exclude nine listings it disfavors."

Asked for comment, Compass told Ars that the legal fight "is about whether homeowners have a choice in how they market their homes, or whether Zillow can set a one-size-fits-all policy for the industry."

"Restricting listing visibility and penalizing agents for exercising lawful and strategic marketing options undermines consumer choice," Compass said.

Defending sellers' choice in how they market their homes, Compass said that it commends MRED for "enforcing policies that protect both consumer choice and the fiduciary obligations agents owe their clients. Buyers in Chicago should not be deprived of access to listings because a platform disagrees with how a homeowner chooses to market their property."

Zillow Preview launch complicates fight

The real estate industry fight escalated in April 2025, when Zillow claims that it "took a competitive stand" to protect consumers by adopting new Listing Access Standards designed to throw a wrench in schemes like the alleged MRED/Compass conspiracy.

Zillow hoped that by threatening to block "listings that had been previously marketed privately to only a select group of buyers and were withheld from all market participants" from appearing on its websites, the market might shift to hide fewer listings.

But after Compass failed to secure an injunction blocking Zillow's new policy, Compass and MRED allegedly teamed up "to threaten loss of access to all of MRED’s listings if a competitor did not display one of MRED’s or Compass’s competing PLN listings," Zillow claimed. They did this, Zillow alleged, understanding that Zillow cannot afford to lose access to all Chicago-area listings and would have to revert to its prior standards.

And they soon followed through on that threat. In early May, after Zillow suppressed nine listings for failing to adhere to its Listing Access Standards, Zillow got a warning threatening to terminate its access to MRED’s listing feed "if Zillow did not display" some of the Compass listings that violated Zillow's policies.

In its motion to compel arbitration, MRED accused Zillow of filing the lawsuit out of its "dissatisfaction" with its contract terms and "insecurity about continuing to generate revenue." The company claimed that any harm that Zillow experienced is "completely self-inflicted, readily avoidable, and can be remedied at any time by simply complying with the same clear and longstanding license agreements under which it has operated for years."

Reached for comment, MRED's spokesperson also pointed to an article calling out Zillow's seeming hypocrisy for challenging MRED's private listing network while launching Zillow Preview, a pre-market listing network.

But Zillow insists that Zillow Preview is "not at all the same" as MRED's alleged scheme. In a statement to Ars, Zillow defended its pre-market listing product as "available for any buyer to see and aligned with our transparency standards."

"Private listings networks are just that—private, and only available to buyers working with a specific brokerage or agent," Zillow said. "The goal of Preview is to help sell the house. The goal of PLNs is to hide the house to force more buyers into working with your brokerage."

Home buyers in the US have in the past few years faced hardships, including "persistently high mortgage rates and home prices," since the housing inventory has never returned to pre-pandemic levels, a 2026 Experian forecast said. While inventory is expected to modestly increase this year, Zillow's legal fight suggests some brokerages may be motivated to increasingly hide new listings to increase profits.

Zillow worries that the MRED/Compass plan will inevitably block platforms that are promoting more transparency from competing with powerful private listings network providers. That will disadvantage both buyers and sellers in major markets like Chicago, Zillow alleged.

"Defendants’ conspiracy harms home buyers and sellers by incentivizing brokerages to withhold listings from the market only until the listing fails to sell privately, thus erecting barriers to information, exacerbating the accessibility and affordability crisis, and reducing the pool of buyers and listings that makes the real estate market efficient and competitive," Zillow alleged.

In its complaint, Zillow said that MRED and Compass "control over 99 percent of the market for Chicagoland real estate listing platforms." Allegedly, they've worked "in lockstep" and "in secret" to "leverage MRED’s monopoly power and control over Chicagoland listing feeds to force competitors like Zillow to display unwanted private listings, abandon pro-consumer listings policies, and block nascent competing offerings that preference access over exclusivity.

"MRED and Compass have colluded to turn back the clock on consumer transparency at the exact moment American families can least afford it, cutting off competition, hiding homes and engineering a market that extracts more from buyers and sellers so Compass can pocket more on every deal," Zillow told Ars.

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Last year marked the beginning of Google's explicit focus on AI search, and this year's I/O solidified that shift. As Google's search VP Liz Reid said during the keynote, "Google search is AI search." This change is well underway, and the very reasonable objections to this path will not dissuade the company. All the metrics that matter to Google say this is the right move. But at the end of the day, Google can get whatever outcome it wants because it's just that big and influential.

Google started testing AI Mode for search just over a year ago, making the shift official at I/O 2025. You hear a lot of complaints around the Internet about how AI is changing Google's search products, but Google is getting what it wants: more searches. Reid revealed at I/O 2026 that AI Mode usage has been doubling every quarter. There are now more than 1 billion people using AI Mode every month.

It's not hard to see how that could be true. AI Mode invites a conversational experience—it asks you questions—and each of those follow-up queries counts as searches. Google has also pushed AI Mode very hard, including prominent links and nudges to get people to use its search chatbot instead of the traditional product. And unlike many of Google's other AI experiences, you don't have to pay anything to AI search. Everyone who uses Google search gets the full AI experience.

You can hardly escape AI Mode as it is, and Google is announcing even more AI Mode integrations at I/O this year. AI Overviews may be the most prominent element of Google's AI search shift, but that's increasingly looking like a stopgap as AI Mode spins up. Google has a new "seamless" search experience that ties AI Mode into AI Overviews. Most Google searches now produce an AI Overview. Google is expanding a mobile feature that lets you move from an Overview into AI Mode. This feature is now available across desktop, too.

Google is getting what it wants from AI search. Credit: Ryan Whitwam

The AI Mode nudge hovers at the bottom of the Overview, actually hiding the top of the organic search results. This will, no doubt, inflate the number of AI Mode searches even more. It may also disincentivise users from scrolling down to see the 10 blue links. It makes organic results feel more like footnotes than the core of the search experience.

Reid also says Google's new search box is the biggest change in its entire 25-year history. A search box isn't very complicated (or didn't used to be), but the new version again guides users toward AI Mode. It expands dynamically as you type more, and it will attempt to autocomplete your searches. Google definitely doesn't want you to call it autocomplete, though! It uses generative AI technology to guess at your intent, guided by what Gemini knows about you. This change is rolling out today globally.

Search vibes

Google's more-AI-than-ever search experience is also veering into experiences that don't really feel like a search engine. Search will employ agents to answer your questions in new ways, powered by Gemini 3.5 Flash. Google says it has integrated Antigravity as a harness for the new model's AI agents in search. This powers two different ways of finding information with vibe coding that are similar but technically distinct.

When you ask questions in regular search (AI Overviews) or AI Mode later this summer, Google's AI may choose to create generative UI. These are single-shot simulations that help you understand concepts like, for example, the golden ratio or the behavior of black holes. These interfaces will have sliders, buttons, and other elements conjured from the AI ether.

AI Mode builds custom mini-apps from a single prompt, but it might not show you the code at launch. Credit: Ryan Whitwam

The other experience is currently limited to AI Mode, and it goes a step further. If your query calls for it, Search will create a custom app to help you with the problem. Currently you have to ask for an app (e.g. make or build 'x' for me), but the line between generative UI and apps may blur over time.

What is that supposed to do for you? Maybe you want to plan a family outing for the weekend, so you ask search to build an itinerary. In that case, Search can create a UI with event suggestions, reviews, map embeds, and calendar integration. It pulls this data from Google's platform as well as from around the web. The early demos of search agent dashboards actually show you the code as it's generated, but Google is most likely going to hide this for the full rollout later this summer. Showing a simplified workflow of chain of thought would avoid confusing the average user who just wants a pretty UI and doesn't care that it was generated on the spot.

You can revisit and change the dashboard by accessing your AI Mode history in the sidebar. These generated apps can be customized with follow-up prompts, and you can share them with others via a link. The other party can even customize the app to their liking. Currently, there is no way to share those modifications, but that's something Google is exploring. It may also be possible in the future to manually modify the code of these mini-apps line by line.

Swallowing the Internet whole

The overarching trend here is fewer blue links and more AI-generated everything. Google says the greater efficiency of Gemini 3.5 Flash enables all these new AI experiences, and we can expect more of them in the future. The agentic app generation in particular may benefit from the pending improvements in Gemini 3.5 Pro, which might even be available before everyone gets search agents.

Googlers talk about these moves as a way to more efficiently extract the information people want from webpages that have become weighed down with extraneous text that forces you to scroll past more and more ads. That is a genuine problem with the current state of web content, but Google's hands aren't clean. Many websites have ended up in this state only after years of chasing search rank and compensating for low ad rates.

Despite what many see as a decline in Google search quality, the company's search products remain far and away the primary way people find things online. Even after a year of Google's AI search overhaul, DuckDuckGo, Bing, Brave, and the rest of the competition continue to be little more than a rounding error. Google appears to take its continued dominance and growth as proof that it's on the right track with AI.

Google has decided this is how search works, and the rest of us are just along for the ride.

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