Why I'm Building an AI Assistant in the Age of Giants
I was poking around the Gemini Extensions list this week and noticed the WhatsApp integration. On the surface it looks like a neat feature. Say “send a WhatsApp to Tushar that I’m running late” and Gemini handles the rest. Finds the contact, composes the message, sends it. You never open the app.
But here’s what that actually means under the hood: Google quietly rolled this out as a default to all Android users in July 2025, whether you’d opted in or not. The same depth of system access that, if I tried to build it into my personal assistant, would get my app flagged, scrutinized, and likely rejected on the Play Store.
Same technology. Completely different rules depending on who’s shipping it.
The sandbox isn’t neutral
Here’s the thing nobody says plainly: the rules of the app ecosystem aren’t a level playing field, and they weren’t designed to be. When a company both owns the operating system and ships an AI assistant, it doesn’t just have a better product surface. It has structural advantages baked in from the start.
And it goes beyond system hooks. It shapes who gets to participate at all.
poke.com, a legitimate company and not a side project, had a WhatsApp integration until a policy change quietly killed it. No transition period, no negotiation. Meanwhile, Google ships a native Gemini-WhatsApp integration without friction.
I’ve seen this up close. I was an early employee at Probo, a prediction market platform in India. Google Play categorized us under real-money gaming and banned us outright. Not because we were doing anything illegal, not because any regulator had ruled against us, but because a private platform decided to moral-police a legal product under the wrong label before the government had even weighed in.
The Play Store is effectively the only door to Android users at scale. When that door closes on a misclassification, it doesn’t matter how good your product is. You’re out.
So why keep building
Because the problem is real, and it exists completely independently of whether Google gives me system hooks or not.
The walled garden is real, but it’s not the whole story. When you’re building for the world, you build for the global average. But India alone contains multitudes. Cultural context shifts every few hundred kilometres, language, social norms, the unwritten rules of how things actually get done. No dataset captures that. No global roadmap prioritises it.
Take the CA on WhatsApp, a licensed professional managing your entire financial life over voice notes and forwarded screenshots, in a thread that also has Diwali wishes and random forwards. Or the ₹99 UPI autopays bleeding quietly every month that nobody tracks because the amount is too small to notice but too many to ignore. Or the notepad that runs every Indian social event, checklists, cash expenses, vendor payments, shagun received and given.
These aren’t edge cases. They’re just how life works here. No global assistant knows they exist.
That’s the space I’m working in. Not by out-resourcing Google, but by being closer to the problem than Google ever needs to be.
On functional equivalence
There’s regulatory movement in this direction. The EU’s Digital Markets Act now requires platform gatekeepers to give third-party developers equal access to the same system features they use themselves. The Commission has even opened a specific proceeding around how Google should grant third-party AI providers the same access as its own apps on Android.
If that extends to India, great. It’ll make things easier. But I’m not building on that timeline.
The problems I’m trying to solve exist right now, within whatever sandbox I’m given. Functional equivalence raises the ceiling. The floor is already interesting enough to build on.
If you’re thinking about the same things
If you’re a developer or designer working on similar problems, localization, contextual AI, what fair platform access actually looks like in practice, I’d genuinely like to exchange notes.
The giants have real advantages. I just don’t think those advantages cover everything.