Opal moves into the Gemini web app as a builder for experimental Gems

What Google actually shipped in the Gems manager

Google made Opal, its tool for building AI-powered mini apps, directly available inside the Gemini web app. The entry point is the Gems manager: users find Opal there and use it to create reusable mini apps, which Google frames as "experimental Gems."

This is a placement decision more than a new capability. Opal already existed with a visual editor at opal.google. What changed is where you reach it — from the same panel where a Gemini user already manages custom Gems, rather than from a separate Labs destination. The mini app becomes another object living alongside the Gems a user has already configured.

The prompt-to-steps view is the frontend detail that matters

The most concrete addition is a new view that, in Google's words, "turns your prompts into lists of steps so it's even easier to understand and edit how your mini apps work." That is a specific interface choice: instead of presenting a mini app as an opaque block of prompt text, the editor decomposes it into an ordered, inspectable sequence.

you'll also notice a new view that turns your prompts into lists of steps so it's even easier to understand and edit how your mini apps workMontana Labs

For anyone who has built with prompt-driven tools, this is the recurring frontend problem: a working prompt is hard to read and harder to modify safely. Exposing structure as a step list gives a user something to point at and change without rewriting the whole thing. It trades the flexibility of free text for the legibility of a workflow.

Two editing surfaces for two levels of control

Google keeps a tiered model. The step-list view inside Gemini is the accessible layer. For "advanced customization options" and "more granular control," users switch to the Advanced Editor at opal.google. So the in-Gemini experience is deliberately the simpler entry, with the full editor still living on the standalone site.

That split tells you how Google is positioning the feature: the Gems manager gets the version meant for quick, guided creation, while the deeper build tooling stays where it was. The two surfaces are linked by an explicit handoff rather than merged into one.

What this means: a standalone builder folded into the assistant

The specific implication of this announcement is that Google is collapsing the distance between a dedicated app builder and the assistant itself. Opal stops being a separate stop and becomes a way to produce Gems from inside Gemini, with a step-list view designed to keep those apps editable by non-specialists.

Google labels this an experiment, available starting the day of the post in the Gemini web app only. The reusable mini app, presented as an experimental Gem, is the unit worth watching — it suggests Gems and Opal-built apps are converging on the same representation inside one management surface.