Gemma 4 (E2B / E4B / 12B)
text, images and audio on a phone, under an apache licence google took three generations to arrive at.
the only genuinely multimodal family that runs at phone scale, now on plain apache 2.0 — the clearest default in this category.
all three sizes handle text, images and audio, including speech recognition and translation. nothing else in this ranking is multimodal at all, and gemma does it in a footprint that fits a phone at e2b and a modest laptop at e4b. that combination is the entire case and it's a strong one.
the licence change is real and underreported. gemma 1 through 3 shipped under google's custom gemma terms of use, with a prohibited-use policy and redistribution obligations — widely called open, never actually open source. gemma 4's own terms page carves itself out and points at plain apache 2.0. google still hosts a prohibited-use page on the same site, but it is not incorporated into the gemma 4 grant.
the description above is ours, condensed from the ranking. pricing moves — check it on the vendor's own page before you rely on it.
- category
- small on-device llms
- pricing
- free (apache 2.0)
- website
- ai.google.dev
the only genuinely multimodal family that runs at phone scale, now on plain apache 2.0 — the clearest default in this category.
we researched this category against vendors' own pricing pages and licence files. that is where this line comes from — not from the vendor, and not from anything they paid for.