Gemma 4 revives local-first hopes

Google is targeting the failure mode that matters most for local AI on phones and edge devices: responsiveness under thermal and memory limits, not just raw model quality. Gemma 4 looks better positioned than Gemma 3, but the real test for an Android vault is sustained UX under repeated OCR, indexing, and long-context passes. MTP may help once generation starts, but it will not by itself solve first-token latency. The practical pattern is narrow local intelligence for extraction, classification, summarization, and retrieval, with heavier analysis handled by selective cloud fallback if zero-cloud performance is not good enough.