Among the many cool new features on the Google Pixel 9 series is a new Pixel Studio app that generates images from simple text commands, similar to Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. The app uses on-device AI models and Google’s cloud-based Imagen 3 model to transform whatever you throw at it, and we did throw at it quite a lot.

To be honest, my boss wouldn’t be happy to know I wasted many, many hours coming up with random ideas and seeing how Pixel Studio would materialize them, then refining and refining my description until I got exactly what I wanted. But hey, this is part of my job description, isn’t it?

Back to Pixel Studio, there’s nothing new here since other image generators have been doing this for a couple of years, but what drew me in was the ease of access. I’ve tried to use Midjourney, Dall-E, Bing Image Creator, Meta’s Imagine, and more, but some are not available in Europe, others require a paid subscription, and almost all of them need a separate app and account. Not to mention the steep learning curve to get Midjourney rolling. I always found all of that too cumbersome and since I’m lazy as heck, I never really dug in.

The Pixel Studio app came pre-installed on my Pixel 9 phones, worked out of the box with my Google account, and only required a quick model download before running on my phone; this removed all the imaginary — and real — hurdles that stood between me and other image generators, and I just kept rolling with one image idea after the other.

For now, the results are cute and fun, but nothing you’d put on a magazine cover. It does handle text well, though, but refuses to deal with any human-like imagery, so I had to get creative using animals, Android figures, and cartoon characters. Check out what I (and some of my Android Authority colleagues) created with Pixel Studio below.

Android and Apples

The 10 images below range from a nice “Android Authority rules” sticker to some Apple-bashing droids, some vacation-mode Androids, and two wearing famous football club kits. I made the Real Madrid one while my colleague Ryan Haines decked his droid with his beloved Chelsea F.C. kit.

Food and arguments

I know you clicked on this article for the Oreo pizza, but have you thought about zucchini and eggplant ice cream? No? Oh, well, here I am to disturb you even more with that magnificent creation. If that wasn’t enough for my “woke up and chose violence” moment, I made some quintessential US vs UK arguments into two fun images. There’s a football and hand-egg arguing about the term “football,” then a British and English dictionary arguing over the spelling of “color.” Let’s just say that my personal allegiances lie with the UK in one case and the US in the other. We’ll call this a tie.

Badass, cute, and funky animals

I’ve always (read: since yesterday) wondered what a heavy metal cat band and a rock and roll dog band would look like, and now I have my answers. I introduce you to “Boots and Snoots” and “Paws and Claws.” The latter has scheduled a concert in your nightmares. Other than that, we have a magician T-Rex with tiny hands, a bamboozled panda, a duck-it autocorrect duck, a cool retro cat, the basketball Dream Team made of kittens, a Lebanese panda judoka, a French elephant weightlifter, and for some reason, my colleague Paul Jones got that weird abomination when he asked Pixel Studio to create the Breaking Bad chicken shop in the middle of a London street.

Cartoon characters

By this point, I was a bit out of ideas, so you get some Pokemon scenery courtesy of Paul’s imagination, some cartoon animals out of place, and for some reason, I chose to dress Winnie The Pooh like Eeyore and Donald Duck with the Mickey Mouse ears. This section is otherwise known as “What is copyright?”

Look, clearly, Pixel Studio isn’t perfect, but it’s a fun tool to have at hand to immediately visualize a random concept, like an Oreo pizza or a team of basketball-playing kittens. Create it, share it, and done. And I feel that that was Google’s intention with it. The app won’t replace photographers, designers, and artists anytime soon, and as a matter of fact, I found that I liked it more when its results were a bit whacky and not realistic. For illustrating those kinds of out-there concepts, it does the trick and it’s very fast. Every creation takes a couple of seconds and you can easily refresh to get a new one if you don’t like the result.

Pixel Studio already supports seven different styles now (freestyle, 3D cartoon, video game, cinematic, sketch, anime, and sticker), but I spotted three more in an older app version before they disappeared (vintage, cyberpunk, and realistic). The app also supports background deletion, text insertion, and sticker making and insertion. So there’s more to Pixel Studio than just image creation, and I hope the app keeps evolving to add more capabilities down the line.

For now, you can have some random fun with Pixel Studio and make quick illustrations to share with friends, but I already have one interesting and very handy real-world use case for it. I just want to test it a bit more before I share my findings.