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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Comet made its mobile debut on Thursday, Perplexity announced.
- The Android app comes with smart summarization and an ad blocker.
- Android’s ecosystem could make it easier for Comet to spread.
AI startup Perplexity announced Thursday that Comet is now available on Android, marking the first time that the AI web browser has been made available on mobile devices.
The Comet Android app takes the web browser’s best-known features, like Comet Assistant and Voice Mode, and modifies them for a mobile experience.
Also: I tried Perplexity’s Comet AI browser, and I like where it’s going (but it’s not there yet)
“We didn’t want to just force a desktop experience onto mobile,” the company said in its announcement. “Instead, Perplexity has redesigned the mobile web browser for the new age of the internet.
The new app also comes with a “smart summarization” feature, which provides AI-generated summaries of open web tabs, as well as a built-in ad blocker. You can download it here.
Android vs. iOS
Perplexity’s Android launch could have big implications in its mission to colonize the broader tech ecosystem.
Since its founding in 2022, the company has painted itself as a pioneer, building a new kind of AI-powered internet. To that end, it’s been undergoing the herculean task of challenging Google’s hegemony over browsing and search. One of Google’s biggest and most obvious advantages is that over decades, its tools have become deeply woven into the mechanisms through which millions of people interact with technology, and by extension, into their daily habits.
The most germane example: Google owns Android, and Chrome comes as the default browser on Android devices. That’s an obstacle to Perplexity’s growth, certainly, but it could also be an opportunity.
Also: I tried the only agentic browser that runs local AI – and found only one downside
Compared to Apple’s iOS, Android is arguably more amenable to the use of alternative, non-mainstream apps and services. While there have yet to be any rigorous studies proving or disproving that Android users themselves are more likely to veer from the beaten path and try newer tools (such as Comet), the Android ecosystem itself could help to foster such a mentality.
For one, the mechanics of Apple’s iOS force all apps and services to be channeled through the App Store, while Android users have access to a range of marketplaces, including Google Play and Amazon’s Appstore. This greater market visibility and selection could make it easier for an up-and-coming challenger like Perplexity to get noticed more and expand its user base.
Even more importantly, it’s easier and more seamless for Android users to change their default browser than it is for iOS users.
Android devices come with a “default apps” control panel (found in Settings > Apps), through which you can select the default browser of your choice. Apple’s iOS has also allowed users to switch their default browser since 2020, but the process is a bit more complicated. It’s a small point of reduced friction, but when it comes to tech adoption, a little less friction can make all the difference. Perplexity could potentially become the go-to tool for millions of Android users, should they decide that they prefer Comet over Perplexity. (And there’s good reason to believe many of them will.)
Zoom out
Launched in July as a $200 per month service for Perplexity Max subscribers, Comet was made freely available to all users in October, with some paid users gaining access to a “background assistant” to handle more complex queries.
Perplexity has promoted Comet as a more agentic alternative to traditional browsers like Chrome and Safari — a tool that uses AI not only to rank search results, but to proactively guide users through their online search experience via interactions with a chatbot.
The idea’s been catching on, and Perplexity is now facing growing competition from other companies with their own agentic web browsers.
In September, Google integrated Gemini into Chrome to deliver user experiences that overlap with those offered by Perplexity’s browser, such as AI-generated summaries of open tabs. Google’s newly upgraded browser can also pull information from its other suite of proprietary apps, including YouTube and Gmail.
Just days after the announcement from Google, software company Atlassian announced it had acquired The Browser Company for a reported sum of $610 million, and that it would renovate the AI-powered Dia browser as an agentic platform for knowledge workers.
Also: I loved Arc browser and was skeptical of its agentic Dia replacement – until I tried it
Though the strategic vision varies in each case, in general, the current push to build a new kind of AI-powered web browser is rooted in the idea that the rise of AI chatbots over the past three years has, to a large degree, rendered the old model of web browsing obsolete. Why navigate an endless series of links when you can just ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity to immediately surface the most relevant information for you?
Chatbots come with their own foibles, of course — of which hallucination is just one — but these are being ironed out all the time, and already, tech companies seem to be able to read the writing on the wall: the future of the internet will very likely be ruled by AI browsers that act as personal assistants.
