GoKawiilRyan Haines / Android Authority
TL;DR Gemini now offers “Extended” thinking to all users across free and paid tiers.
Extended thinking allows Gemini to take more time to weigh its response before sending it to users.
While extended thinking should offer better responses, it could also deplete usage credits faster.
Gemini has been going through a lot of changes, whether that’s a new UI with spirited animation or a new theming system that matches Gemini’s colors to your Android phone’s wallpapers. On top of that, Google’s new Gemini 3.5 models bring efficiency-related upgrades, while its Spark agent is ready for you to offload your mundane tasks that can be worked on in the background. Along with these, Gemini is getting additional controls that let you change how deeply it thinks.
Right around Google I/O 2026, we started seeing the initial rollout for different “Thinking” levels in Gemini. These come in two options: Standard and Extended. The latter, as you would expect, lets Gemini think more deeply and for longer before responding to your queries, along with step-by-step reasoning. While at the time of our previous reporting, the feature was only available for a few of our teammates, it’s now available more widely.
Josh Woodward, VP of Gemini at Google, recently announced in an X post that Thinking levels are now available to users across multiple platforms. That includes the web interface, as well as the mobile interfaces on Android and iOS.
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You can choose the Thinking level by heading over to the model settings in Gemini. The “Standard” and “Extended” thinking options are available across Gemini 3.5 Flash and Gemini 3.5 Flash-light, and are available to both free and paying users.
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