Google Retires Gemini 2.0 Flash June 1 — Developers Face API Failures and a Double Migration to 3.5

Google AI for Developers·medium signal

Gemini 2.0 Flash-001 and Flash-Lite-001 shut down June 1 with no automatic fallback — any hardcoded model IDs in production now return API failures. Teams migrating to gemini-2.5-flash face a second mandatory cutover by October 16, just 4.5 months away. The pragmatic move is to skip 2.5 entirely and migrate directly to gemini-3.5-flash (GA since May 19, no announced shutdown), but Google's accelerating deprecation cadence — three major model versions in under a year — signals that model selection must now be abstracted, not hardcoded.