Play Store: Google's secret project to improve Gemini

Share your code and earn money. Here is more or less the essence of the message received by certain developers publishing their applications on the Play Store. Who sent this email? Google, which has been tightening its grip on the Android ecosystem for months.

404 Media was able to access the content of the message through a developer who preferred to remain anonymous, but whose application has been downloaded several million times on the Play Store.

“Confidential pilot project”

Thus, Google offers those concerned the opportunity to “participate in a confidential pilot project”. This should allow them to “generate additional income thanks to their applications”.

“Earn money by sharing the code that makes your applications work, as well as your archived projects,” writes the Mountain View firm in its email. The web giant also specifies that the developer, if he accepts, will retain his intellectual property rights over the code in question and that this is not an exclusive license.

Google is also taking advantage of this to try to sell dreams: “whether it’s the active production code that powers your current application or archives of prototypes and side projects that are no longer in use, this code could hold untapped value.” “This is a unique opportunity to contribute to the transformation of tools and products, to support the developer ecosystem and to generate new revenue,” says the multinational.

No direct mention is made of artificial intelligence or Gemini. On the other hand, as 404 Media points out, a link in the email goes to a page dedicated to “partnerships to improve our AI products”. This leaves little room for doubt as to the purpose of the maneuver.

Google's strategy

On this page, precisely, Google explains that it does not want to be satisfied with the data freely available on the web and that all the artificial intelligences have already searched from top to bottom.

The firm wants to enrich its AI by paying for the sharing of “content not accessible to the general public in various multimedia formats”. So understand that Google wants functional, robust code tested in real conditions on which to train its AI (presumably Gemini).

Catch up with Claude and Copilot

Why is Google embarking on such a confidential project? Quite simply because, even if Gemini is very powerful in many respects, in terms of code generation, Google believes it must catch up. In 2026, the benchmarks are neck and neck: on SWE-bench Verified, Gemini 3.1 Pro (around 80.6%) is close behind Claude Opus 4.6 (around 80.8%).

But Claude Code remains the benchmark for complex multi-file work, and this is where Google wants to progress (and has already made progress with generation 3.5 of Gemini).

To make up for this delay, Google no longer wants to be satisfied with raw material freely accessible on the Internet. “We have found that code from practice proves useful in developing our products and services across a wide range of use cases, from understanding complex logic to developing code reviews and performance tests. Your code tested in production can be directly useful to us,” writes the firm.