Google released Gemini 3.5 Flash, starting an accelerating cadence of roughly one Flash release a month through 2026. The company was clearly prioritizing its cheap, fast tier while the next Pro flagship kept slipping.

Each Flash iteration brought small but real gains in agentic coding and instruction following, keeping Google competitive on price-performance even without a new Pro. Developers got a steady drip of upgrades.

The Flash treadmill became the defining pattern of Google's 2026: four Flash releases shipped while the long-awaited Gemini 3.5 Pro never materialized.