Gemini Spark is now on Mac. That is the announcement. What it actually means: a Google-authored process installs on your machine and runs continuously, monitoring what you do, talking to apps, and taking actions on your behalf. Not when you open it. Always.
The macOS expansion adds real-time tracking — Google's term — and hooks into more applications than the prior Windows build supported. What “real-time tracking” resolves to in measurable terms has not been published. No idle CPU budget. No RAM floor. No network call frequency. Google has not filed those numbers.
The marketing calls this “agentic.” The working definition is simpler: the software acts without a prompt. It infers intent from context it has already collected. That is what the 24/7 framing means. The assistant is not waiting. It is already running.
The tradeoff is obvious and unspoken in the announcement. A process that watches continuously in order to help continuously is also a process that knows continuously. What it retains, where it sends that data, and what the on-device versus cloud split looks like have not been specified in any document Google has released publicly alongside this launch.
The machine underneath Gemini Spark is a persistent daemon with inference capability and elevated app permissions. That is not a criticism. That is a description. Whether it is worth the access it requires depends on numbers Google has not yet given you.