India leads the way on Google’s Nano Banana with a local creative twist (techcrunch.com)

Google’s Nano Banana (Gemini 2.5 Flash Image) has exploded in India, driving the Gemini app to the top of app charts domestically and globally as users adopt the image model in distinctly local ways. Indians have popularized retro 1990s Bollywood portraits, “AI saree” vintage looks, landmark backdrops, miniature figurine trends and time‑travel effects — and have also used Google’s Veo 3 video model to animate old family photos. Appfigures data Google shared shows India averaged 1.9 million monthly Gemini downloads Jan–Aug, contributed 15.2M downloads year‑to‑date versus the U.S.’s 9.8M, and saw a post‑update spike from 55k daily installs Sept. 1 to 414k on Sept. 13 (a 667% jump). Revenue remains concentrated in the U.S. ($2.3M of $6.4M iOS spend), though India posted an 18% month‑over‑month spending surge (Sept. 1–16). The trends matter beyond virality: they reveal how cultural context shapes prompt engineering, model output and diffusion of creative norms, while intensifying privacy and safety questions as users upload personal photos. Google is layering provenance tools — a visible diamond watermark plus hidden SynthID markers — and testing a detection platform with plans for a consumer checker, but acknowledges ongoing tradeoffs between fulfilling user requests and preventing misuse. For AI/ML practitioners and policymakers this is a live case study in localization, moderation, traceability and the scaling challenges of multimodal generative systems.