Google Gemma 4: Everything Developers Need to Know

Google dropped Gemma 4 on April 2, 2026, A full generational jump in what open models can do at their parameter range and the first time in the Gemma family's history that one ships under Apache 2.0, meaning commercial use without permission-seeking. Some context: since Gemma's first generation, developers have downloaded the models over 400 million times and built more than 100,000 variants. Four Models, One Family Gemma 4 is a family of four, each aimed at a different point in the hardware spectrum. E2B : Effective 2 billion active parameters. Runs on smartphones, Raspberry Pi, Jetson Orin Nano. 128K context window. Handles images, video, and audio. Built for battery and memory efficiency. E4B : Effective 4 billion active parameters. Same hardware targets, higher reasoning quality. About 3x slower than E2B, but noticeably more capable. Also supports images, video, and audio. Up to 4x faster than prior versions, 60% less battery. 26B MoE : 26 billion total parameters, but only 3.8 bil