TL;DR: Google opened a public preview of its Connected Apps Platform, letting any business or developer submit an app that plugs directly into Gemini and Google Search using the Model Context Protocol. Gemini already has more than 50 connected apps live, including Adobe, Peloton and meditation app Calm, and those same integrations are rolling out to Search over the coming weeks.
Connected Apps have quietly been part of Gemini and Search for most of this year, letting people link accounts like Canva or YouTube Music and then act on them directly, say, designing a flyer or building a playlist without leaving the conversation. What changed this week is who gets to build one. Google opened the Connected Apps Platform preview to any developer willing to sign up, rather than keeping the feature limited to a hand picked set of launch partners.
The mechanics run through the Model Context Protocol, the increasingly standard way AI products talk to outside tools. Developers integrate either a cloud hosted MCP server or an Android MCP setup using Google’s AppFunctions APIs, then use something called the Google Connected Console to register, test, and ultimately submit their app for review. Once live, developers choose whether their integration shows up in Search, the Gemini app, or both, and they get ongoing visibility into traffic, latency, and error rates after launch, along with control over how their verified logo and account branding appear.
Gemini’s existing roster already includes more than 50 connected apps, spanning outside partners like Adobe, Experian, Localiza, and Peloton alongside Google’s own stable of Workspace, Photos, YouTube Music, and Google Home. Search currently runs a smaller set, Instacart, Canva, YouTube Music, and Yahoo Fantasy Football among them, with Google saying Gemini’s broader app catalog will extend to Search over the next few weeks. Meditation app Calm is the one brand new name Google called out specifically, with its integration headed to both Gemini and Search soon.
Nobody’s pretending this happens in a vacuum. ChatGPT has its own connected apps ecosystem, and Meta has been pushing something similar through Muse. The pattern across all three is the same: AI assistants are becoming the layer users increasingly expect to act through, not just chat with, and whoever controls the biggest library of app integrations controls a meaningful slice of how people actually get things done online.
For now, the preview is US only and gated behind a developer waitlist, with no public timeline for a wider rollout. That caution makes sense given what’s at stake. Letting third party apps execute real actions inside Search and Gemini, booking something, buying something, editing something, means Google is extending a level of trust to outside code that a simple search result link never required. Getting the review and permissions model right matters more here than shipping fast.
It’s also another example of Google treating Search less like a results page and more like an operating system with its own app store, a shift that runs parallel to the AI Mode ad expansion rolling out across ten new countries this same week. Both moves point the same direction: Search increasingly does things for you rather than just pointing you somewhere else to do them, and both ads and now third party app actions are becoming native parts of that experience rather than separate destinations.
Developers who want in should expect something closer to an app store review process than a simple API key signup. Submitting through the Connected Console, getting approved, and showing up inside a billion-user surface like Gemini is a meaningfully bigger opportunity than publishing a standalone app ever was, and Google is likely to treat access accordingly. The companies that move early here, the way developer platforms like GitHub’s Copilot Fusion are moving early on model routing, stand to define what good looks like before the category gets crowded.
The bottom line
Google just turned connected apps from a curated showcase into an open platform, and MCP is the plumbing making it possible. Whether this becomes the next real app store or a feature nobody outside a handful of brands bothers with depends entirely on how fast Google widens access past this initial US preview.
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