{"slug": "agentic-and-flexible-a-next-era-of-android-development", "title": "Agentic and Flexible: A next era of Android development", "summary": "At the Android Dev Summit, Google announced broad availability of new Android Studio and Android CLI tools and APIs that let developers bring their own coding agents into Android app development. Android Studio Rabbit 2 is now stable and supports Claude Agent, Codex, Antigravity and more than 40 ACP-compliant agents, while Android CLI adds Firebase-powered device streaming, Jetpack Compose preview rendering, Perfetto system tracing profiling, bundle analysis and 30+ Android skills spanning 20+ areas. Google also launched official agent plugins for Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex and introduced an Android intelligence system for prototyping Connected Apps that share app services with users when Gemini acts as the system AI agent.", "body_md": "In a time where the way you work is changing, your craft, creativity, and expertise are needed more than ever. Today at the [Android Dev Summit](https://developer.android.com/events/dev-summit), we annouced the broad availability of many tools and APIs designed to remove everyday friction and give you more flexibility to build great Android apps. These updates help you code smarter and faster, offer solutions for agentic experiences, and help simplify scaling across a wide variety of screen sizes.\n\n## **Helping you build high quality apps with the tools and agents of your choice**\n\nWith the number of new models and agents increasing every day, we’ve heard that you want the flexibility to select the ones that suit your particular work best. You now have more flexibility than ever before with updates to Android Studio and Android CLI to make it even easier [for your agents to build high quality Android apps](https://developer.android.com/blog/posts/android-dev-summit-26-developer-tools-performance).\n\n### **Bring Your Own Agent**\n\n[__Android Studio Rabbit 2__](https://developer.android.com/blog/posts/ai-agents-android-studio-integration) is stable today, letting you choose your preferred coding agent, such as Claude Agent, Codex, Antigravity, or any of over 40 ACP-compliant agents, directly in Android Studio to harness its full suite of developer tools.\n\n### What’s new in Android CLI\n\n- [**__Android Device streaming__**](https://developer.android.com/tools/agents/android-cli/commands/device?_gl=1*12mhw8m*_up*MQ..*_ga*OTI3OTc0MDM0LjE3OTMwMzA0Mzg.*_ga_6HH9YJMN9M*czE3OTMwMzA0MzgkbzEkZzAkdDE3OTMwMzA0MzgkajYwJGwwJGg3MzU0MDczMDY.) **and Compose** [**__previews__**](https://developer.android.com/tools/agents/android-cli/commands/preview?_gl=1*gog839*_up*MQ..*_ga*OTI3OTc0MDM0LjE3OTMwMzA0Mzg.*_ga_6HH9YJMN9M*czE3OTMwMzA0MzgkbzEkZzAkdDE3OTMwMzA0MzgkajYwJGwwJGg3MzU0MDczMDY.)**:**  Test on real devices remotely with Android device streaming, powered by Firebase, now in Android CLI. Your agent can also now render Jetpack Compose previews, enabling instant visual validation without needing an Android Emulator or deploying an APK.\n- [**__Profiling__**](https://developer.android.com/tools/agents/android-cli/commands/profiler?_gl=1*12mhw8m*_up*MQ..*_ga*OTI3OTc0MDM0LjE3OTMwMzA0Mzg.*_ga_6HH9YJMN9M*czE3OTMwMzA0MzgkbzEkZzAkdDE3OTMwMzA0MzgkajYwJGwwJGg3MzU0MDczMDY.)**:**  Improve your app’s performance and memory through system tracing. Captures production-grade system traces (Perfetto) to debug cold startup latency, UI jank, and background wakeups.\n- [**__Analyze__**](https://developer.android.com/tools/agents/android-cli/commands/analyze)**:**  Check your app bundles and libraries (AAs/Js) for quality signals like your obfuscation, optimization and shrinking score. You can use this to find quality problems using the same logic Google Play does before upload.\n- **New** [**__Android skills__**](https://developer.android.com/tools/agents/android-skills)**:**  We have 30+ skills that cover 20+ areas to give your agents the expertise for complex Android tasks, such as permissions security, Glance widget layouts, Compose performance optimizations, and more.\n- **Official Android** [**__agent plugins__**](https://developer.android.com/tools/agents/android-cli/agent-plugins?_gl=1*1js8ckm*_up*MQ..*_ga*MTQ2MjcyMDk4MS4xNzkzMTQ0NzIx*_ga_5QGJFZTNG7*czE3OTMxNDQ3MjAkbzEkZzAkdDE3OTMxNDQ3MjAkajYwJGwwJGgw)**:** the Android plugin for Google Antigravity has been updated with all the latest capabilities of Android CLI, plus adds deeper integrations to enable you to view Compose previews and interact with real Android devices right from Antigravity. We’ve also launched official plugins for Claude Code and Codex by OpenAI.\n\n## **Build intelligent, agentic experiences on Android**\n\nTo support developers and businesses in the emerging agentic landscape, we are introducing new APIs designed to simplify the creation of rich, engaging user experiences.\n\n- **The Android intelligence system**  provides users with both prompted assistance and proactive assistance across the Android ecosystem of devices.  You can now prototype with a Connected App to share your app’s services to Android users when Gemini is the system AI agent. Once ready, sign up for the Connected Apps Platform preview to publish to production across surfaces.\n- **Share your app's capabilities with any agent through Android MCP.**  Leverage the[__AppFunctions__](https://developer.android.com/ai/appfunctions) API – Android’s unified tool calling layer – to expose functionality that can be used by their own on-device agent or system agents. AppFunctions is now in beta.\n- **Turn agent replies into native app UI with A2UI for Jetpack Compose, in alpha.** Agent-to-UI (A2UI) lets agents respond with a real interactive UI built from your app's own components instead of a wall of text. The new native Jetpack Compose renderer makes it feel fully at home in your Android app.\n- **Build on-device agents with Gemini Nano 4 via the new agentic APIs in** [**__ML Kit__**](https://developers.google.com/ml-kit/genai)**, in alpha.**  We've expanded the ML Kit Prompt API, with the new Agentic API leveraging the new capabilities in Gemini Nano 4. The Agentic API auto-executes functions for you, saves conversation history, manages the orchestration loop, and includes automatic guardrails.\n\n### **Bring your app’s services to users right where they are**\n\nTo help developers connect with high-intent users across Gemini and Search, we are introducing the new [__Connected Apps Platform__](https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/gemini-app/connected-apps-one-place/). You can build natively using Android MCP or Server MCP, prototype using Gemini dev mode, and register through the Google Connected Console preview program when you are ready for production.\n\n## **New API support to build across premium form factors** \n\nExpanding your app across the growing Android ecosystem allows you to engage users wherever they are, creating new touchpoints and driving deeper interaction. We continuously develop new APIs to simplify app adaptation and enable unique experience layering. With new Jetpack Compose-first foundations, adaptive building blocks, and agentic UI features, you can seamlessly scale your app's architecture and UI across many form factors.\n\n- **AppState, in alpha,** brings Compose’s reactive model down to the state layer, providing Compose-first architecture building blocks that devs and AI agents can use to preserve state across device configurations.\n- **Navigation 3 1.2**  is stable with [__deep links__](https://developer.android.com/guide/navigation/navigation-3/deep-links) support and richer Predictive back handling.\n- **Compose-first UI development expands with the upcoming Compose 1.13 stable release,** bringing built-in support for adaptive layouts with Grid and Flexbox migrating to stable and new functionality like Progressive Blur and Formatted Text.\n\n### **Accelerate your reach with Googlebook and foldables with new skill support**\n\nWith the arrival of Googlebook, your apps can now scale seamlessly across phones and laptops without requiring a separate codebase. The [__Compose adaptive skill__](https://github.com/android/skills/blob/main/jetpack-compose/adaptive/SKILL.md) helps agents transform mobile apps to scale across phones, foldables, Googlebook, tablets, parked cars and XR.\n\nToday we have updated it to make it faster and easier to make your existing apps ready for desktop. The Adaptive skill can now audit your Compose UI to find and implement keyboard shortcuts, custom pointer cursors, hover states and tooltips for buttons and controls. In addition to understanding navigation and migrating layouts to Grid, FlexBox, and mediaQuery, it now explicitly handles end-to-end state management across the app.\n\nAnd finally the skill now also includes foldable posture optimizations, such as automatically refactoring media and camera screens into tabletop layouts. Next year Google Play will be looking closely at how your app or game runs on a foldable and providing you more opportunities to showcase how you’ve built adaptively. For apps, make sure to optimize by using the [__Compose adaptive skill__](https://github.com/android/skills/blob/main/jetpack-compose/adaptive/SKILL.md) and follow the [__Android adaptive quality guidelines__](https://developer.android.com/docs/quality-guidelines/adaptive-app-quality). For games, follow the [__adaptive games guidelines__](https://developer.android.com/games/build-adaptive-apps). We’ll announce details on what is required for the Google Play store later this year. \n\n## **Build for an expanding lineup of Android XR devices**\n\nToday, together with XREAL, we launched [__XREAL AURA__](http://xreal.com/aura), the world’s first wired XR glasses powered by Android XR, along with the graduation of several core libraries and tools to stable.  \n\n- **Core Jetpack XR SDK libraries are now stable** and bring production-ready APIs, long-term API stability, and backward compatibility across  Jetpack SceneCore, ARCore for Jetpack XR, and XR Runtime.\n- **Android XR emulators in Android Studio, now stable** , letting developers build, iterate, and visually validate experiences for  XR Glasses, audio glasses, and display glasses without needing physical hardware.\n- **Android XR Engine Hub, now stable,**  delivers dedicated workflow and easy access to start and analyze performance traces across Unity, Godot and Unreal\n- **Geospatial APIs in ARCore for Jetpack XR SDK and Unity** , enable developers to anchor digital content to the real world with accuracy and local tracking across wired XR glasses and intelligent eyewear.\n\nWe are eager to receive your feedback on these new tools and capabilities. We look forward to your ideas on how we can continue improving our tools to support your app development journey.\n\n- \n              [Product News](https://developer.android.com/blog/categories/product-news)\n            Announced today during The Android Show, Android is transitioning from an operating system to an intelligence system, creating more opportunities for engagement with your apps. [Matthew McCullough](https://developer.android.com/blog/authors/matthew-mccullough) •\n      4 min read\n- \n              [Product News](https://developer.android.com/blog/categories/product-news)\n            Since launching the Android XR SDK Developer Preview alongside Samsung, Qualcomm, and Unity last year, we’ve been blown away by all of the excitement we’ve been hearing from the broader Android community. [Matthew McCullough](https://developer.android.com/blog/authors/matthew-mccullough) •\n      4 min read\n- \n              [Product News](https://developer.android.com/blog/categories/product-news)\n            Apps that target the upcoming Android release will no longer be able to directly write to contacts with the WRITE_CONTACTS permission. [Roxanna Aliabadi Walker](https://developer.android.com/blog/authors/roxanna-walker) •\n      6 min read\n\nGet the latest Android development insights delivered to your inbox weekly.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/agentic-and-flexible-a-next-era-of-android-development", "canonical_source": "https://developer.android.com/blog/posts/build-it-your-way-a-next-era-of-android-development", "published_at": "2026-10-28 00:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-28 17:14:24.474441+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "ai-tools", "developer-tools", "ai-products"], "entities": ["Google", "Android Studio Rabbit 2", "Android CLI", "Claude Agent", "Codex", "Antigravity", "Gemini", "Firebase"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/agentic-and-flexible-a-next-era-of-android-development", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/agentic-and-flexible-a-next-era-of-android-development.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/agentic-and-flexible-a-next-era-of-android-development.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/agentic-and-flexible-a-next-era-of-android-development.jsonld"}}