Building Premium Android Experiences at Google I/O ‘26

Posted by Ataul Munim, Android Developer Relations Engineer A truly differentiated Android experience is about delivering premium delight wherever your users are. At Google I/O ‘26, we showcased how the latest advancements in the Android ecosystem can help you elevate your app's quality while maximizing development efficiency.   Here is a recap of the essential updates and sessions you need to know to deliver a next-level experience across form factors!

Maximize app performance and ROI with the R8 Configuration Analyzer A premium experience is only as good as its foundation, and a performant foundation is what allows your app to scale across the Android ecosystem. This is especially true with the release of Android 17, which introduces conservative, device RAM-based app memory limits to target extreme memory leaks and outliers before they cause system-wide instability. To stay below these new system thresholds and prevent your app from being terminated, having a lean footprint is no longer optional: it’s a critical requirement.

This year, we’re making it easier to build highly optimized, fast apps by introducing the R8 Configuration Analyzer in Android Studio. R8 is your most powerful tool for improving app performance, but its effectiveness is often limited by overly broad "keep rules" that prevent the compiler from stripping away unused code. The new Configuration Analyzer provides optimization, obfuscation, and shrinking scores, allowing you to identify specific rules that are preventing the benefits of R8 optimization.

By optimizing their R8 configurations, developers at Monzo achieved a 30% improvement in cold starts and a 35% reduction in ANRs. Smaller, faster code isn't just about efficiency; it's about ensuring your app has the memory headroom to deliver delight on every form factor, from the phone to the car. Extend your reach with a unified approach to Widgets on Phones, Watches and Cars User interaction is shifting toward quick, glanceable moments—short bursts of information that keep users connected without needing to open the full app.

To help you increase the reach of your app content, we are unifying the development experience across the Android ecosystem with Jetpack Glance. ), and cars with a familiar workflow. In order to help users engage with your content and features, even outside your app, we are making widgets more expressive and adaptive with RemoteCompose.

On Wear OS, RemoteCompose allows you to use the Compose tools you’re already comfortable with to define UI logic that renders natively on remote surfaces, ensuring that your glanceable experiences remain highly performant and responsive even on resource-constrained hardware. On mobile and cars, RemoteCompose is used as a new framework giving Widgets new expressive capabilities. You can use Jetpack Glance (together with RemoteCompose on Wear) to deliver a cohesive user journey.