Gemini 3.5 Flash costs 3x price of 3.1 Pro in Android coding test
Gemini 3.5 Flash costs 3x price of 3.1 Pro in Android coding test
https://9to5google.com/2026/06/12/gemini-3-5-flash-on-googles-android-coding-rankings/
Publish Date: 2026-06-12 11:10:00
Source Domain: 9to5google.com
Google has released another set of benchmark results to determine the best AI models for Android coding, along with how much each model costs per token. Google’s Gemini 3.5 Flash is easily the most resource-intensive in Android development, and it doesn’t even make the top five.
As the hype for general chatbots is dying down, companies like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic are shifting towards agentic models with a strength in coding. Users have begun relying on these models for “vibe coding,” which essentially offloads the bulk of software development to LLMs.
Recent models have dramatically improved their Android coding, and Google has kept tabs on which models perform best over the past few months. The “Android Bench” goes through updates as Google releases its own models, like the recent Gemini 3.5 Flash, and compares them to the competition.
The main takeaway is how Google breaks these models down. Each model gets a score out of 100, indicative of the percentage of Android coding cases it can successfully solve across 10 runs. Google lists expected performance and the date the last test was run, with some high performers sticking around since February.
In the latest edition of Android Bench, the results paint a more expensive picture. Gemini 3.5 Flash ranks 6th in the Android Bench list under models like GPT 5.5 and Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview, which was tested in February.
Gemini 3.5 Flash was touted as a cheaper and faster alternative to Gemini 3.1 Pro, with an expected performance gap of 6.1%. The new benchmark results say otherwise in regards to Android development, as Gemini 3.5 Flash has a higher latency and 9% gap in performance success.
The kicker – Google’s latest model costs an average of 355.9 tokens at $147.1 for one benchmark run, compared to Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview’s 73.3 tokens used at around a third of that cost.
Of course, it’s worth noting that…
