Supercharging the Gemini App with Custom MCP Connectors, Skills, and Live GitHub Access

Howdy friends! If you spend as much time playing with Google’s AI ecosystem as I do, you’re probably jumping between different Google tools frequently. Each tool plays a distinct role in your workflow.

For me, almost all of my serious work — whether creating applications, building sites, or writing blogs — happens inside Google Antigravity. Empowered with context, skills, and MCP servers, Agy is the agentic harness that knows my expectations, rules, and all of my GitHub repos — including my dazbo-content writing persona. It's basically my agentic ghost writer!

But I also use the Gemini Web App (gemini.google.com) and mobile app as my everyday Swiss Army knife. Whether I'm proofreading a LinkedIn post, planning flights, knocking up a video, or asking Gemini to airbrush a rogue pizza box out of a photo, the Gemini App is always ready in a browser tab.

There was just one friction point: my GitHub context was not available to the Gemini App. My writing persona, reusable skills, and project docs live inside my public and private GitHub repositories. I wanted the Gemini App to have on-demand access to all these repos across every conversation, without manually copy-pasting files like a caveman.

“Hang on, Dazbo — doesn’t the Gemini app already have a built-in GitHub connector?”

“It does indeed.”

“So you just toggled it on and went to the pub?”

“If only it were that simple.”

As I quickly discovered, the out-of-the-box GitHub connector in the Gemini web app is not quite what you think it is. Fortunately, Google has added a couple of powerhouse customisation features to the Gemini app: Custom Model Context Protocol (MCP) Connectors and persistent Skills.

In this article, I’ll disambiguate where the Gemini App fits alongside Google AI Studio and Antigravity, tour the pre-made connectors, see why the native GitHub connector falls short, and walk step-by-step through wiring up GitHub’s managed remote MCP server.

Wait — Which Tool Should I Use?

Google drops a lot of products with overlapping capabilities, and their branding can be so much fun to keep up with. Here is how I use these tools in my own workflows:

1. Google Antigravity (Antigravity Extension for Your Favourite IDE, Antigravity IDE, & Antigravity CLI)

Antigravity is Google’s agentic development harness. It’s my daily driver for anything I do that is worthy of its own Git repo. This even includes writing blogs and whitepapers.

2. Google AI Studio (aistudio.google.com)

If you haven’t looked closely at Google AI Studio lately, you might still think of it purely as a prompt playground where you tweak temperature sliders and grab a GEMINI_API_KEY. It still does that; but here's what else you can do with it:

From the Playground, explore the latest Google models — such as Gemini Argon, Gemini Omni, Nano Banana, TTS, Lyria, Live Translate, and Gemma — and toggle grounding with Google Search or Google Maps.

Configure models in the UI and open ready-to-execute code snippets in one click. This screenshot shows how easy it is to obtain the code for low-latency real-time audio conversation using gemini-3.8-live, or open it directly in Google Colab.

Build new applications from a prompt.

Explore the Gallery of pre-built agents and applications to use as-is, or remix into your own apps.

Use the Dashboard to manage API keys, link Google Cloud projects, view model usage, or set hard monthly spend limits.

One-Click Cloud Run Publishing, GitHub Sync & Direct Export to Antigravity: (Tip: If you open a showcase app from the Gallery, it initially opens in read-only mode — click Remix in the top-right corner first to create your own editable copy!) Once you own the app, click Publish in the top-right header to deploy it straight to Google serverless Cloud Run. And what if that prototype needs serious engineering — maybe an automated test suite? Switch to the <> Code tab and click Export in the top-right corner to Push to GitHub or click Export to Antigravity to open it directly in Google Antigravity!

So clearly, AI Studio is an amazing way to rapidly build and deploy an application from scratch. But it’s also great for creating a prototype or seeding a project before working on it in Antigravity.

3. The Gemini App (gemini.google.com) & Mobile App

This is your web-based conversational AI assistant and research workspace. It has no access to your local file system or tools.

Alongside text chats, you can have real-time voice and live camera/screen-sharing video conversations with your assistant, plus:

Multimodal image, audio & video creation, and in-place editing.
Integration with Google Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM).
Integration with the Deep Research Agent.
Integration with Canvas: A side-by-side workspace for co-writing documents and slide decks (with inline tone/length sliders and one-click export to Google Docs or Slides), transforming notes into infographics, quizzes, or Audio Overviews, and live-previewing interactive HTML/React apps and 3D visualisations (or exporting Python scripts to Google Colab).

Scheduled Actions: Built-in background automation that runs one-off or recurring prompts on a schedule — such as a daily morning tech briefing or weekly project summary.
Persistent Skills: Install skills into the Gemini App and invoke them explicitly with @ or /, or implicitly by letting Gemini activate matching skills automatically. Because these use the open SKILL.md standard, you can share the exact same skill folders with Google Antigravity (or any other coding agent).
Connected Apps / Connectors: Links your assistant to first-party Google services (Google Workspace, Gemini Notebook, YouTube Music), over 40 partner integrations (Canva, Adobe, Dropbox, Shopify, monday.com), and custom Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers.

In my own day-to-day workflow, it’s my favourite tool for anything that doesn’t warrant a full IDE workspace, doesn’t need local tools, or doesn’t require a local Git repo. For example:

Chatting through ideas out loud with Gemini Live on my phone
Kicking off some Deep Research, perhaps before persisting in a Gemini Notebook
Proofreading a LinkedIn post
Building a quick 3D visualisation in Canvas
Checking on a recent Google product rebrand (yeah — I have to do this a lot)
Creating photos and videos
Comparing flight options

A Quick Tour of Pre-Made Connectors in the Gemini App

Head to Settings → Connectors to open the Connected apps hub, where Google groups customisations into Connectors and Skills.

First, take a look at some of the integrations available out of the box:

Google Workspace: Read, write, and automate across your Google apps. Draft emails in Gmail, create Google Docs or Sheets, and schedule Calendar events.
Canva: Connects to your Canva workspace so you can search your existing Canva folders and designs, generate new presentations or social graphics with your Brand Kit, tweak existing templates, resize assets across channels, and export directly to .pptx, .pdf, .png, or .mp4.
Picsart: Connects to Picsart’s creative pipeline, unlocking deterministic utilities that raw generative models don’t natively handle — such as true background removal (to .png or .webp), vectorisation for scalable logos and icons, and access to many third-party creative models (like Flux, Ideogram, Recraft, Kling, Runway, and ElevenLabs) right inside your Gemini chat.
Wispr: Connect to your Wispr Flow desktop meeting recorder. Let Gemini search your recorded meeting transcripts, scratchpad notes, and action items by participant or date — so you can ask “What did I commit to in yesterday’s architecture sync?” without ever inviting a creepy third-party recording bot into your calls.
GitHub: “Import code from public or private repositories, and ask questions about it.” (More on this shortly!)

Why I Want GitHub Access in Every Gemini Conversation

Everything I build and write in Antigravity lives in GitHub. Not just code and applications, but my article drafts, and presentations too. I keep much of my AI configuration, harness and writing persona in a private GitHub repo.

So when I’m in the Gemini App or on my phone, I want to say things like:

“Proofread this LinkedIn post using my dazbo-content style guide.”
“Review this Medium draft against my style guide rules.”
“Which public repos have I updated this month?”
“How did I structure the ADK evaluation loop in harness-engineering-demo?”

Why the Out-of-the-Box GitHub Connector Is No Good

When you see GitHub in the Installed list, you might assume enabling it gives Gemini tool access to query your GitHub repos on demand. It doesn’t!

It’s not an agentic tool integration. It is a manual static context importer attached to the + button in the chat bar (+ → More uploads → Import code). It has some limitations:

Manual Per-Chat Uploads: You must paste a repo URL into a single chat. Start a new chat tomorrow? Import it again.
Zero Cross-Repo Discovery: Gemini cannot list your repos or search for files across your account.
No Live Git Intelligence: It only ingests a static file snapshot — no commits, PRs, Actions runs, or issues.
Single-Repo Tunnel Vision: Mid-conversation, it cannot hop to another repo to check a config file or skill.

Enter the GitHub Remote MCP Server

To get on-demand agentic access across all of our repositories in every chat, we can use GitHub’s managed remote MCP server (https://api.githubcopilot.com/mcp/) configured as a Custom Connector. This server exposes GitHub's capabilities to any AI agent, such as the Gemini App.

Better still, GitHub lets us control which toolsets are exposed — and whether Gemini has read-write or strictly read-only access — simply via the URL path:

Default Toolset — Read-Only (https://api.githubcopilot.com/mcp/readonly): (Recommended) Safe cross-repo exploration, reading private files/skills, code search, and PR/commit analysis with zero mutation risk.
Default Toolset — Read/Write (https://api.githubcopilot.com/mcp/): Workflows where you also want Gemini to create issues, branches, or PRs directly from chat.

I use https://api.githubcopilot.com/mcp/readonly so Gemini can read anything across my public and private repos without any risk of a stray prompt pushing a commit or closing an issue.

How OAuth 2.0 Works Between Gemini and GitHub

Because both the Gemini App and the GitHub MCP server live in the cloud, we don’t want to paste our Personal Access Token (PAT) into our chat. Instead, the Gemini App authenticates with GitHub on your behalf using standard OAuth 2.0.

In a typical OAuth setup between an AI client (like Gemini) and a service provider (like GitHub), there are three pieces of configuration:

Client ID & Client Secret: Obtained by registering an OAuth App in your GitHub Developer Settings. This gives your Gemini connector its own dedicated identity and lets you revoke access at any time with a single click.
Authorization Callback (Redirect) URI: The exact URL inside the client application where GitHub is allowed to send you back (along with a temporary authorisation code) after you click Authorize. For security, GitHub strictly validates that the redirect URI requested during login matches the callback URL registered on your GitHub OAuth App.

To set this up, keep Gemini and GitHub open in two browser tabs: start in the Gemini App to copy the Redirect URI, paste it into GitHub to register your OAuth App, and then copy the resulting Client ID and Secret back into Gemini.

Step-by-Step: Adding the Custom GitHub MCP Connector

Let’s wire it up. We’ll create a dedicated OAuth App in GitHub specifically for our Gemini connector.

Step 1: Open the Custom MCP Modal in Gemini and Grab the Redirect URI

Go to Settings → Connectors (gemini.google.com/customize/connectors) and click + Custom.
Paste https://api.githubcopilot.com/mcp/readonly into MCP server URL.
Click Additional settings → Show more, then click Copy redirect URI underneath Client ID and Client secret.

This will generate a unique callback URI bound to your Google User ID:

https://oauth-redirect.googleusercontent.com/r/user_bound_custom-mcp-<YOUR_GOOGLE_USER_ID>-api_githubcopilot_com

Step 2: Register Your Dedicated OAuth App in GitHub

In GitHub, go to Settings → Developer settings → OAuth Apps (github.com/settings/developers) and click New OAuth App.
Set Application name to Gemini MCP Connector and Homepage URL to https://gemini.google.com.
Paste the exact https://oauth-redirect.googleusercontent.com/r/user_bound_custom-mcp-... URI into Authorization callback URL and click Register application.
Copy your Client ID, and click Generate a new client secret to copy your Client Secret.
Be sure to Save (or Update) the App in GitHub.

Step 3: Complete the OAuth Handshake in Gemini

Return to the Connect to an MCP server dialog in Gemini, paste your Client ID and Client Secret, and click Next.
Click Authorize in the GitHub OAuth popup.
Accept the privacy policy.

Finally, click Connect.

Once redirected back, GitHub MCP Server appears under Custom apps:

Testing It Live: Querying Repositories and Loading My Persona

In a new Gemini chat, ask a question that needs GitHub access, or tag @GitHub MCP Server from the @ menu. For example, when I ran List my public GitHub repos please, Gemini queried the live MCP server and rendered a table of all 33 of my public repositories:

Then I can ask something like: “Load my seo-audit skill from my dazbo-config repo.” Gemini loads the skill from my private repo and lets me know we're ready to use it.

Easy peasy!

Wrapping Up

Antigravity, AI Studio and the Gemini App are all Google AI tools, but they serve different purposes in my daily workflows.

By wiring GitHub’s managed remote MCP server into the Gemini App’s Custom Connectors and pairing it with persistent Gemini Skills, gemini.google.com evolves from an isolated chat tab into a context-aware workspace. It is connected to my public and private repos, personal docs, and my own style guides and codified persona.

Give it a go, and let me know in the comments what custom MCP servers and skills you are wiring into your Gemini App!

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