Two weeks ago, I built a RAG pipeline on my phone. Termux. Gemma 4 E2B. A Python script that took my lecture notes and turned them into a private AI tutor I could interrogate offline. It worked. It was slow. It was fragile. But it worked.
Then Google dropped an entire family update, and I realized I'd been running the equivalent of a beta test.
After digging through the architecture docs and benchmarks that have come out since the release, I revisited my original build to answer one question: if I were starting fresh today, what would I actually do differently?
What's New Under the Hood
The Gemma 4 family now has four variants, and the architecture decisions baked into them directly address the pain points I hit in my original build .
