17 Things to know for Android developers at Google I/O

Posted by Matthew McCullough, VP, Product Management, Android Developer Today at Google I/O, we announced the many ways we’re powering agentic workflows to increase your productivity and ensure your apps shine across the expanding Android ecosystem. Here’s a recap of 17 of our favorite announcements for Android developers; you can also see what was announced last week in The Android Show: I/O Edition . Stay tuned over the next two days as we dive into all of the topics in more detail!

Build High Quality Android Apps Using Agents 1: Android CLI: helping you build with any agent, LLM, and tool Android CLI is now stable . It offers programmatic tools that allow any AI agent, including Claude Code, Codex, or Antigravity, to perform core Android tasks much more easily and efficiently. With today’s release, it also provides a bridge to tap directly into the "heavy-lifting" power of Android Studio to give you the production-ready polish needed for professional Android development.

By leveraging the new android studio commands, developers can now grant their preferred agents the ability to perform semantic symbol resolution, analyze files for warnings, and even render Jetpack Compose previews. This release also enables official support for "Journeys" through new Android skills , which enables agents to execute end-to-end UI tests under your direction. 0.

2: Build production-ready apps with ease in Google AI Studio Developers and creators can now build native Android apps, simply with a prompt in Google AI Studio . The apps are built with development best practices like Jetpack Compose, Kotlin, and APIs that leverage our recommended developer patterns. Google AI Studio enables developers to prototype, iterate via an embedded emulator, and deploy to physical devices without heavy local installations.

Developers are then able to take those apps and share them to Android devices, as well as share them with others for testing through Google Play Console’s internal testing track. If a developer wants to prepare their app for a wider release, they’re able to take it to Android Studio for advanced debugging, testing, and UI polish. Watch the developer keynote , and tune into the What’s New in Android tools talk for more information.

Use the embedded Android Emulator to create Android apps in Google AI Studio 3: Accelerating AI coding assistance with Android Bench Android Bench is our LLM leaderboard for Android development challenges. The goal is to accelerate model improvements, so you have more useful options for AI assistance. Many of you have been using open-weight models for AI assistance, so we’re now adding commonly used ones, such as Gemma 4, to the leaderboard, so you can see how LLMs that offer offline access and additional flexibility for power-users measure up.