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I/O 2026: What’s new in Google Play

Posted by Paul Feng, VP, Google Play Eng, Product, UX

At Google Play, we’re passionate about helping people connect with the experiences they’ll love, while empowering developers like you to turn great ideas into lasting business success.

At this year’s Google I/O, we talked about our evolving business model that offers more choice and new ways for your apps and content to be discovered on and off the store. We also unveiled advanced tools and insights that will help scale your business with less complexity.

Expanding your reach by meeting users where they are

Your apps and the incredible worlds you build are no longer just a single destination, but connected experiences that reach users across surfaces and devices. To help you meet users where they are, Google Play continues to evolve into a content-forward destination that delivers immersive and personalized experiences on the store, across their devices, and directly within your apps and games.

Beyond the store: Expanding discovery to new surfaces & devices

We're unlocking new opportunities for your apps and content to be discovered across the wider Android ecosystem.

  • Surfacing your apps and content in Gemini: As people increasingly start their journeys with virtual assistants, we want to ensure your apps and their content are an essential part of this. In the coming weeks, we're enabling app discovery in the Gemini app on Android and Web, connecting your apps and games to millions of Gemini users. Later this year, Gemini will also surface over 450,000 movies and TV shows, as well as where to stream live sports, and deep-link users directly into your app content.
Gemini will provide users with app suggestions and direct access 
to entertainment content during a search.
  • Delivering personalized content across the ecosystem: Engage SDK surfaces deliver your content to over 30 million monthly active users and drive millions of app opens every month—a massive 45% increase year-over-year. And we’re making it even more powerful by expanding support for new surfaces and devices.
    • Store listing integration: Starting next month, existing users will see Engage SDK content directly on your store listings.
    • New tablet surfaces: We’re broadening reach across Android tablet surfaces, including home screen Collections.
    • Global scale: Every Engage SDK surface can now scale your content across over 80 Play markets.

Boost re-engagement by integrating with Engage SDK today. If your app is already integrated, no further action is required to benefit from these updates.

On the store: Enhancing content formats and conversational search

We’re also optimizing the Play Store to help grow your audience with engaging content formats and a more intelligent search experience, to make it easier than ever for users to find and connect with your app.

  • Capturing attention with Play Shorts: Our full-screen, portrait, short-form video feed gives users a glimpse of your app’s look, feel, and functionality. Play Shorts is rolling out to users in the US and select developers, and we look forward to expanding this to more markets and developers in the coming months.
Play Shorts provides a glimpse into your app’s look, feel & functionality.
  • Enabling deeper search journeys with Ask Play: Building on AI-powered Q&A, which already answers 95% of user queries, we’re introducing Ask Play. This AI-powered overlay turns discovery into a natural conversation, understanding the full context of a user's question and adapting to follow-ups to recommend the right app. Plus, with Ask Play highlights, users can get a high-level summary of complex searches directly on the search results page to help find the right apps or games more effortlessly.
Ask Play understands the full context and helps users find the right apps or games.

In your games: Deepening player engagement and community

Once players launch your title, the real challenge is keeping them in the action. Play Games Sidekick provides an in-game overlay that gives players instant access to gaming information—like AI-generated Game Tips, rewards, and achievements — driving higher engagement while keeping players immersed. Sidekick has already debuted in over 100+ titles, and we’re building on this momentum with:

  • New social features: Starting next month, players can see which friends are playing the same game and track their achievements
  • Global expansion: Sidekick expands to all participating titles this summer. Head over to Play Console to enable Sidekick and begin testing the user experience so that you're ready for our global launch, while also meeting one of our core Level Up program guidelines.

Scaling your business with less complexity

We’re streamlining your day-to-day tasks while providing more comprehensive reporting to help you capture more growth opportunities.

Streamline your Play Store operations with AI

We’re using Gemini models to handle the heavy lifting of localizing your store content and managing your catalog.

  • Localize with less effort: Eliminate manual copy-pasting by uploading a structured file (like a CSV or Google Sheet). Gemini models enable Play Console to pre-populate your listings across different languages for your review. You can also leverage AI-translated subscription benefits to quickly scale your localization efforts.
Instantly pre-populate store listings with localized translations.

  • Convert search trends into growth: We’ve simplified the path from insight to action. When you click a keyword recommendation on your Grow overview page, Gemini creates a new custom store listing automatically tailored to that keyword—ready to deploy with just one click.
  • Simplify catalog management: We’re introducing agentic catalog management to help you manage your one-time products. Soon, you can leverage new in-console capabilities to execute bulk price changes, import SKUs, and configure metadata, saving hours of manual work.
New agentic capabilities in Play Console will make managing your catalog seamless.

Behind-the-scenes features that optimize your revenue

We’re building tools to maximize your revenue at every stage—with zero developer work required. When a user decides to buy, our platform helps ensure that the transaction completes at the point of conversion, renewal, and retention.

  • Optimizing conversion with delayed charging: When a payment initially fails, our risk models evaluate the transaction. If it’s low-risk, we grant the user access to your paid content while we retry the charge in the background. This means your lowest-risk subscribers get the best experience and you are less likely to lose them due to a temporary glitch.
  • Boosting renewals with extended recovery periods: To prevent involuntary churn, we’ve extended the default account recovery period from 30 to 60 days to give subscribers more time to fix failed payments, like expired credit cards. This shift has driven up to an 18% reduction in involuntary churn and a 9% reduction in total churn for top developers.
  • Maximizing retention with flexible flows: A rigid experience makes retention nearly impossible. Coming soon, our new in-app subscription management API lets subscribers change plans or accept a downgrade offer the moment they hit “cancel.” Combined with replacement modes that automate prorated refunds, you’ll have a powerful toolkit to save at-risk subscribers.
Flexible flows let subscribers change plans or accept downgrades to boost retention.

More reporting and AI-powered insights

We’re providing more data and more AI-powered insights to help you understand your performance and ROI on Play.

  • Measure your full marketing impact: See your app’s total visibility on Play with our new reach metric. Gain better insight into store listing performance with indirect value not previously reported. Analyze downstream impact—like engagement, retention, and monetization—with our new traffic source breakdowns.
  • Optimize the path to purchase and retention: We’ve added cart conversion rates to your core performance metrics to help you identify and fix friction in your checkout flow. New data on subscriber tenure and churn reasons allow you to better pinpoint why subscribers leave and which segments are most at risk.
  • Get faster answers: Using Gemini models, we’re expanding chart descriptions from the Statistics page to the Reach & Devices and Store Performance pages to help you spot trends instantly. With new interactive Q&A and proactive monetization insights, you can ask why a metric shifted and instantly receive tailored recommendations to optimize your business.
Get instant answers and recommendations for optimizing your business.

Protecting your success

In addition to making it easier and faster to publish safer apps, we’re also making it easier to secure your app’s revenue and reputation.

  • Defend your business against fraud and abuse: The new Protected with Play dashboard helps you monitor and configure your integrity, distribution, and monetization defenses all in one place. We’re also reducing warm-up latency for Play Integrity API, so you can use these checks during speed-critical user journeys to block threats and risky devices faster.

The Protected with Play dashboard provides centralized insights to help you safeguard your app.
  • Get proactive protection for your store and revenue: We work behind the scenes to help stop malicious activity before it impacts your business. Last year, our automated anti-spam protections blocked 160 million spam ratings and reviews while our anti-fraud efforts automatically protected apps using Play Billing from 3.2 billion dollars in fraud and abuse.

Growing your business on Google Play

Our latest updates reinforce our commitment to deliver the highest return on your team’s investment, by expanding your reach beyond the store, simplifying your day-to-day operations, and helping you better safeguard your success. We’re excited to see you use these new capabilities to create even more impactful experiences. Thank you for being a part of the Google Play community.

Learn more about these announcements and all other Google I/O 2026 updates on io.google starting May 21.


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Updates to the Android XR SDK: Introducing Developer Preview 4

Posted by Stevan Silva, Group Product Manager and Amy Zeppenfeld, Developer Relations Engineer


Today we're excited to launch Developer Preview 4 of the Android XR SDK, continuing our focus on unifying cross-device development for headsets, wired XR glasses, and intelligent eyewear. To keep our platform intuitive, we are adopting more descriptive naming for our form factors, where AI glasses are now audio glasses and display AI glasses are now display glasses, with these changes appearing in our documentation starting today.

This release is packed with updates that help you build incredible experiences for XR devices, enable deeper immersive experiences on XR headsets, and streamline the path for creating augmented experiences on audio and display glasses. Also, our core libraries—including XR Runtime, Jetpack SceneCore, and ARCore for Jetpack XR— will be officially moving to Beta soon!

To give you early access to hardware and resources for building immersive and augmented experiences on upcoming devices—like display and audio glasses and XREAL’s Project Aura — we’re announcing the Android XR Developer Catalyst Program. Learn more and start your application today.

Building Augmented Experiences for Audio and Display Glasses

Starting out with our libraries for augmented experiences, Developer Preview 4 introduces new APIs that help you create and test your apps.

Jetpack Projected: Device Availability and ProjectedTestRule APIs

The Jetpack Projected library helps bridge app experiences from the phone to the user's field of view. We've added the Device Availability API, which consolidates wear state and connectivity signals into standard Android Lifecycle.State values. This lets you adjust your applications behavior based on whether the device is worn.

val xrDevice = XrDevice.getCurrentDevice(projectedContext)

// Observe the device lifecycle flow
xrDevice.getLifecycle().currentStateFlow
    .collect { state ->
        when (state) {
            Lifecycle.State.STARTED -> { /* Device is available (worn) */ }
            Lifecycle.State.CREATED -> { /* Device is unavailable (not worn) */ }
            Lifecycle.State.DESTROYED -> { /* Device is DISCONNECTED */ }
        }
    }

To simplify testing, the new ProjectedTestRule API in the projected-testing artifact automates the setup of projected test environments. This helps you write clean, reliable unit tests without the boilerplate code.

// from the 'androidx.xr.projected:projected-testing:1.0.0-alpha07' artifact
@get:Rule
val projectedTestRule = ProjectedTestRule()

@Test
fun testProjectedContextInitialization() {
    // by default, ProjectedTestRule automatically creates and connects
    // a projected device before each test
    val projectedContext = ProjectedContext.createProjectedDeviceContext(context)

    // assert the projected context is successfully initialized
    assertThat(projectedContext).isNotNull()
}
Jetpack Compose Glimmer: Google Sans Flex and new components

Our UI library for display glasses, Jetpack Compose Glimmer, now includes Google Sans Flex for improved legibility on optical see-through displays. We’ve also added several interactive components:

  • Stacks: Designed for touchpad-optimized groups, showing one item at a time.
  • Title Chips: Provides categorization and context for content cards.

Building Immersive Experiences for XR Headsets and Wired XR Glasses

If you're looking to build fully immersive experiences for XR Headsets and wired XR Glasses, we have several big updates.

Beta Transition & Modern Architecture

XR Runtime, Jetpack SceneCore, and the ARCore for Jetpack XR perception features (Depth Maps, Eye/Hand Tracking, Hit Testing, and Spatial Anchors) will soon move to Beta, so we’ve streamlined the Jetpack XR APIs. We've removed legacy Guava and RxJava3 packages in favor of a modern, Kotlin-first architecture.

Jetpack SceneCore: glTF and Custom Meshes

We're expanding 3D model capabilities by adding the ability to fine tune 3D models and access specific nodes with a 3D model. Using GltfModelNode, you can modify properties like pose, materials, and textures, and even run animations for specific nodes.

// Create a new PBR material
pbrMaterial = KhronosPbrMaterial.create(
    session = xrSession,
    alphaMode = AlphaMode.OPAQUE
)

// Load a texture.
val texture = Texture.create(
    session = xrSession,
    path = Path("textures/texture_name.png")
)

// Apply the texture and configure occlusion
pbrMaterial.setOcclusionTexture(
    texture = texture,
    strength = 0.5f
)

// Access the hierarchy of nodes
val entityNodes = entity.nodes

// Find the specific node
val myEntityNode = entityNodes.find { it.name == "node_name" }

// Apply the PBR material override
myEntityNode?.setMaterialOverride(
   material = newMaterial
)


We're also bringing Custom Meshes to SceneCore. Custom meshes let you build geometry on the fly programmatically, which is ideal for creating custom 3D models. This feature will launch as experimental, so try it out and let us know what you think!

  
// Create the mesh
val roadMesh =
    CustomMesh.BuilderFromMeshData(session, roadVertexLayout)
        .addVertexData(ByteBufferRegion(roadDataBuffer, 0, vertexDataSize))
        .setIndexData(ByteBufferRegion(roadDataBuffer, vertexDataSize, indexDataSize))
        .setTopology(MeshSubsetTopology.TRIANGLES)
        .build()

// Define the material
val roadMaterial = KhronosPbrMaterial.create(session, AlphaMode.OPAQUE)

// Instantiate the entity using the custom mesh and material
val roadEntity =
    MeshEntity.create(
        session,
        roadMesh,
        listOf(roadMaterial),
        pose = roadPose,
)


Compose for XR: Native glTF Support

We now have native glTF support directly in Compose for XR with SpatialGltfModel. Use this along with SpatialGltfModelState to access nodes and animations in the glTF model, or use them to add textures and materials to your 3D models.

   val myGltfModelState = rememberSpatialGltfModelState(
        source = SpatialGltfModelSource.fromPath(
            Paths.get("models/my_animated_model.glb")
        )
    )

    val myGltfAnimation =
        myGltfModelState.animations.find { it.name == "animation_name" }

    DisposableEffect(myGltfAnimation) {
        myGltfAnimation?.loop()

        onDispose {
            myGltfAnimation?.stop()
        }
    }

    SpatialGltfModel(state = myGltfModelState, modifier = modifier)

ARCore for Jetpack XR: Geospatial API Preview for Wired XR Glasses

We’re also providing an early preview of the Geospatial API for wired XR Glasses in ARCore for Jetpack XR. This update enables high-precision anchoring of digital content tied to real-world locations in over 87 countries.

By combining ARCore’s Visual Positioning System (VPS) with the reasoning and audio capabilities of the Gemini Live API, you can create contextually aware experiences that understand both the location and position of your user. Imagine building an immersive, AI-guided walking tour that provides real-time audio descriptions of nearby places, seamlessly blending digital information with the physical environment.


Start Building the Future Today

It's an amazing time to develop for Android XR. With the Jetpack XR SDK moving to Beta soon and a robust set of new tools at your fingertips, explore each of the following areas to get your app's experiences ready for XR!

Read the documentation, explore the samples, and check out the XR experiments

Head to the official Android Developer site for full technical guides, API reference, and instructions on setting up the new emulator. Get inspired with our samples and experiments. See how we've used these APIs to build immersive spatial layouts, load 3D models, explore spatial audio, and more!


Check out what's new for game engines

We've added official support for Unreal Engine and Godot, and we've launched two new tools to accelerate development for Android XR with Unity and the Android XR Interaction Framework. And, based on your feedback, we are introducing the Android XR Engine Hub to allow you to run your experiences directly from your preferred engine,


Apply for the Android XR Developer Catalyst Program

Don’t miss your chance to build for the latest Android XR hardware. Apply today for the opportunity to gain access to pre-release hardware, including our audio and display glasses prototype and XREAL’s Project Aura.

We look forward to seeing the amazing XR experiences you build as we move toward the launch of more Android XR devices later this year!

Explore this announcement and all Google I/O 2026 updates on io.google.

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What’s New in Wear OS 7

Posted by John Zoeller, Developer Relations Engineer




Today, we are excited to introduce Wear OS 7, a major update that brings a new era of power efficiency and intelligence to users and developers alike.

We recognize that watches are essential, all-day companions to your users. That’s why we're continuing to invest in power optimizations so your users can do more with their favorite apps. For watches upgrading from Wear OS 6 to Wear OS 7, average users can expect up to 10% improvement in battery life.

As part of a broader rollout to the Android ecosystem, select watches arriving later this year will come with Gemini Intelligence, providing proactive and personalized help to our users so they can focus on what matters.

With Wear OS 7, we’re introducing new system capabilities and enhanced developer tools. New user-facing features like Live Updates, and enhanced media controls deliver a smarter, more intuitive personalized experience on the wrist. And with enhancements to our developer toolkit such as Wear Compose 1.6 and AppFunctions, developers will be able to streamline their apps for efficient, intuitive experiences on the wrist.

Let's dive right in!

Wear OS 7 Canary

You can now try out the next version of Google’s smartwatch platform, Wear OS 7 Canary Emulator, based on Android 17 that's arriving later this year.

The new emulator allows you to get hands-on with the developer features and tools mentioned above while testing your app for compatibility with the upcoming platform.

Check out what’s changed and start testing your app today.

Explore new Wear OS features

Wear OS Widgets


Full-screen Tiles have been a go-to surface on Wear OS, providing users with instant, glanceable access to their essential updates. As the Android ecosystem moves further toward a unified vision for widgets, we’re bringing the watch closer to the rest of the Android family with the goal of minimizing efforts for developers.

Today, we’re excited to introduce the next step in the evolution of Tiles: flexible and dynamic Wear Widgets.

Powered by Jetpack Glance and the new RemoteCompose framework, Wear Widgets offer greater expressiveness and consistency with Compose than the Tiles ProtoLayout libraries. Wear Widgets support two new card layouts—small and large, that align perfectly with the 2x1 and 2x2 formats on mobile, ensuring your designs feel cohesive across devices, while still allowing you to optimize your designs for the wrist.

It’s easy to adapt the UI from the mainSlot of your full-screen tile to a 2x2 Widget. Take a look!

Check out the Widgets I/O Talk later this week for full details on the new features, and try out our Widgets Getting Started Guide to add a Widget to your Wear OS experience.

Live Updates


Wear OS 7 brings Live Updates to watches!

You can use Live Updates to surface real-time, important information from your watch or mobile app, providing your users with timely updates at a glance.

In your watch app, use Live Updates instead of the Ongoing Activities API to provide local update publishing on all Wear 7 devices. For supporting OEMs, Live Updates published by your phone app will also be bridged to users' watches.

Check out how Just Eat provides updates to their users, above!

For more information, check out Notifications on Wear OS.

Connect your app to the intelligence system

We're working on several ways for developers to provide agentic experiences on the watch, from AppFunctions to task automation tools.

We’ll announce these on our developer blog when they’re ready, and provide an all-encompassing developer guide to help you choose the right one and craft a robust implementation. For now, here's a quick look.

AppFunctions


The AppFunctions API allows developers to integrate their apps with agents and assistants, like Google Gemini, enabling users to complete tasks using voice, often replacing the need for step-by-step, manual navigation with your UI.  

For example, to start a run with the Samsung Health app, users are able to tell Gemini: “Start tracking my run.”

We’re currently running an Early Access Program for any developers who are interested. Sign up in our form to express your interest.

Task automation

Also coming soon, without any development effort at all, users will be able to invoke and track automated app tasks, for selected phone apps, directly from their watch, like placing an order with DoorDash!

Keep an eye out for these flexible options on how to prepare and connect your app to the Android intelligence system on our developer blog.

Wear Workout Tracker


We know that building a full-featured, high-quality fitness tracking experience on Wear OS from scratch is resource-intensive, so we built the all new Wear Workout Tracker experience for exercise apps. It will be included in Wear OS later in the year. 

The workout tracker provides a rich standardized workout tracking experience which includes heart rate monitoring, media control, and a collection of other useful features to help you reduce development investment while guaranteeing a high-quality experience for your users.

We’ve been working closely with ASICS Runkeeper to bring it to their users, check it out!

Enhanced System Media Controls in Wear OS 7

Wear OS 7 enhances the System Media Controls, giving users more control and seamless experiences for their media.

Per-App media auto-launch controls

Users can now personalize their media auto-launch experience per-app directly from the System Media Controls on the watch.

For any app where the user has ‘Auto-launch Settings’ toggled on, media controls will automatically appear on the watch when media is started on the phone.

Developers with an existing implementation of media apps that extend on the watch can benefit from this feature without additional effort.

Seamless audio routing with the Remote Output Switcher

Managing audio output is now easier than ever with the new Remote Output Switcher integrated into the System Media Controls. 

When listening to media on a paired phone, users can effortlessly switch the device the media is played back on directly from their wrist.

UI Library updates

To go along with all these new features for users, we’re introducing some powerful enhancements to our developer toolkits to help developers prepare for the future of Wear OS!

Compose for Wear OS 1.6

As the foundation for Wear OS development, Compose for Wear OS 1.6 has arrived.

It includes powerful updates including:

Streamlined navigation with Navigation 3

Developers can Integrate with Navigation 3 to provide a more flexible and Compose-idiomatic way to handle navigation on Wear OS.

@Composable
fun WearApp() {
    val backStack = rememberNavBackStack(MenuScreen)
    WearAppTheme {
        AppScaffold {
            val entryProvider = remember {
                entryProvider<NavKey> {
                    entry<MenuScreen> { GreetingScreen() }
                    entry<ListNavScreen> { ListScreen() }
                }
            }
            val swipeDismissableSceneStrategy = rememberSwipeDismissableSceneStrategy<NavKey>()
            NavDisplay(
                backStack = backStack,
                entryProvider = entryProvider,
                sceneStrategies = listOf(swipeDismissableSceneStrategy)
            )
        }
    }
}
List management improvements for TransformingLazyColumn

Significant improvements are here for advanced list management with TransformingLazyColumn, including enhanced padding support via the new minimumVerticalContentPadding modifier, and other new features like snapping and reverse layout.

val listState = rememberTransformingLazyColumnState()
val transformationSpec = rememberTransformationSpec()

/*
 * TransformingLazyColumn takes care of the horizontal and vertical
 * padding for the list and handles scrolling.
 */
ScreenScaffold(scrollState = listState) { contentPadding ->
    TransformingLazyColumn(
        state = listState,
        contentPadding = contentPadding
    ) {
        item {
            ListHeader(
                modifier = Modifier
                    .fillMaxWidth()
                    .transformedHeight(this, transformationSpec)
                    .minimumVerticalContentPadding(
                        ListHeaderDefaults.minimumTopListContentPadding
                    ),
                    transformation = SurfaceTransformation(transformationSpec)
            ) { Text(text = "Header") }
        }
    }
}

Optimize ambient experiences with LocalAmbientModeManager

The all new LocalAmbientModeManager is optimized for handling ambient flows, giving developers greater control over how their ambient experiences are presented to users.

override fun onCreate(savedInstanceState: Bundle?) {
    setContent {
        val ambientModeManager = rememberAmbientModeManager()
        CompositionLocalProvider(LocalAmbientModeManager provides ambientModeManager) {
            val localAmbientModeManager = LocalAmbientModeManager.current
            val ambientMode = localAmbientModeManager?.currentAmbientMode

            Column(
                verticalArrangement = Arrangement.Center,
                horizontalAlignment = Alignment.CenterHorizontally,
                modifier = Modifier.fillMaxSize(),
            ) {
                val ambientModeName =
                    when (ambientMode) {
                        is AmbientMode.Interactive -> "Interactive"
                        is AmbientMode.Ambient -> "Ambient"
                        else -> "Unknown"
                    }

                val color = if (ambientMode is AmbientMode.Ambient) Color.Gray
                    else Color.Yellow
                Text(text = "$ambientModeName Mode", color = color)
            }
        }
    }
}

Protolayout & Tiles updates

While we encourage developers to adopt the new Wear Widgets, we will continue to support our Protolayout and Tiles libraries for some time, and we’ve got new stable versions of both.

Protolayout 1.4 and Tiles 1.6 work together to provide several notable new features including:

  • Inlined Image Resources: ImageResource can now be directly inlined within a layout, and Tiles now support automatic resource collection through ProtoLayoutScope,removing the need for manual resource mapping and splitting into separate methods. In addition to better code quality, this improves Tiles loading latency via consolidation into a single binder call from system to the provider service.
  • Material3TileService: Tiles can be implemented as a Material3TileService – an all-encompassing suspend function which returns both tile layout and resources, while automatically managing the MaterialScope and ProtoLayoutScope to simplify the development experience.
  • Dynamic Service Switching: On Wear 7, multiple TileService instances can now be grouped in the manifest to enable dynamic switching between different services that represent the same tile.

Check out the new Tiles sample here.

WFF 5

Watch Face Format version 5 (WFF5) is now available with a host of new features to make it easier to build watch faces, including:

  • Enhanced Alignment Options: Text elements like TextCircular have additional alignment options, including verticalAlign on the same baseline for multiple text elements.
  • Auto-Size Enhancements: isAutoSize can now be used on TextCircular,and a new attribute, minSize, has been added to the Font element to limit the minimum size when autosizing is enabled.
  • Blend Modes: Group and ComplicationSlot elements now support blend mode, in addition to existing support on Part* elements.
  • Stroke Joins: Stroke and WeightedStroke elements now include a join attribute.
  • Hierarchical settings: User Styles can now be structured as a hierarchy, where some settings are visible only when other settings have specific values. User Styles can now enable or disable complication slots as well. These can be configured using the childSettingIds and complicationSlotIds on User Style Options.

Check out our new developer guidance to learn more about WFF 5.

Start building for Wear OS 7 now

With these updates, there’s never been a better time to develop an app on Wear OS. These technical resources are a great place to learn more about how to get started:

We’re looking forward to seeing the experiences that you build on Wear OS!

Explore this announcement and all Google I/O 2026 updates on io.google.


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What’s new in Android for Cars: Unifying platforms and unlocking premium experiences

Posted by Jan Kleinert, Developer Relations Engineer, Android for Cars, Noam Gefen, Senior Product Manager, and Thomas Weathers, Developer Relations Engineer, Android for Cars


We're thrilled to see developers continuing to bring their apps and experiences to Android for Cars! Over the past year, we've continued to see strong growth and momentum in the app ecosystem on Android Auto and cars with Google built-in. This year at Google I/O, we're introducing updates that benefit both drivers and developers by enabling richer, more differentiated in-car experiences. With new features and templates that allow you to build once to reach users across different infotainment screens and car platforms, it's easier than ever to build for the road.

What's new in the Car App Library

We're bringing more flexibility, new components, and new template capabilities to the Car App Library. Car App Library 1.8.0-beta01 and Car App Library 1.9.0-alpha01 are now available.

Build templated media apps for both Android Auto and Android Automotive OS

Developers can now build customized, distraction-optimized, media browsing and playback experiences for Android Automotive OS, making it easier to build once and deliver these templated media apps to more users and more cars.

To help you test the experiences on Android Automotive OS, we'll be launching updated system images for the Android Automotive OS emulator. Beginning with revision 3, the API level 35-ext15 system images will support apps built using the Car App Library media templates.

Unlocking developer creativity with Car App Library 1.9.0 alpha

With the 1.9.0-alpha01 release of the Car App Library, we're bringing features to help you build more differentiated, expressive experiences across Android Auto and cars with Google built-in.

We're increasing the modularity of existing templates to give developers more flexibility and options for laying out content. These improvements include expanded headers for better visual emphasis, such as on detail pages, spotlight sections that can be placed in scrollable areas to highlight specific content, and grid item variations to support different content types and states.

We're introducing new components and template capabilities to help developers build even more engaging experiences. For media apps, we're introducing an adaptive mini-player, so users can browse while still easily managing playback. Finally, we're adding more component types including Chip and CondensedItem to increase the ways that content can be displayed and interacted with.

App developers, including those shown below, have already begun building upgraded media experiences using these new Car App Library features. You can join these developers and prepare to distribute your own media apps built with the Car App Library templates by applying to participate in our early-access beta program.

Amazon Music, Gaana, PocketFM, Spotify, TuneIn, YouTube Music

Distribute your adaptive video apps to more cars with minimal effort

You’ve already built the apps, now we’re helping you reach more users. For the first time in Android Auto, users will be able to sit back, relax, and watch videos while parked. Apps, like YouTube, will be able to deliver smooth, 60fps HD video playback. This brings the Android Auto parked experience in line with the high-fidelity, immersive experiences users already enjoy in cars with Google built-in.

This capability will start rolling out to compatible vehicles later this year, for users with phones running Android 17 and higher. If your video app is already adaptive, making it available for parked use cases in cars requires minimal effort. To express interest in making your video app available on Android Auto, fill out this form.

Widgets are coming to cars

The next generation of Android Auto brings a more expansive user interface and the Material 3 Expressive design system you know from the phone into the car, built to seamlessly fill larger screens no matter what shape they are. With this new design, the investments you've already made in mobile widgets will be available to users of Android Auto this year, and cars with Google built-in later on, opening up new ways to reach and engage with your users while they're on the road. We're excited to unlock these new glanceable user journeys!

The road ahead

You can look forward to even more updates coming to cars later this year.

  • To deliver a more continuous user experience, we're making it possible for you to provide a templated experience while driving that can seamlessly transition to a native, adaptive app experience when the vehicle is parked.

  • New components and conversational templates will be coming to the Car App Library, so you can integrate agentic and voice-based flows more seamlessly in apps.

  • Improved app brand expression across all car surfaces allow experiences built with the Car App Library to feel easily recognizable by your users.

  • Google Maps SDK support is coming to cars with Google built-in. With this change, you'll be able to use the Google Maps SDK to render map-based content with the MapWithContentTemplate in point-of-interest (POI) and Weather apps on both Android Auto and cars with Google built-in.

Stay updated on these features and start building with the latest at goo.gle/cars-whats-new.

Explore this announcement and all Google I/O 2026 updates on io.google.

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Android UI Development is Compose First

Posted by Nick Butcher, Product Manager


In the almost-5-years since Jetpack Compose launched, we've invested in bringing you all the features, performance and tools that you need to build amazing UIs across the variety of Android devices. Compose helps you to build beautiful, adaptive UIs that meet the demands of modern UI design.
  • Rich feature set: With a powerful library of layouts, input, graphics, animation APIs, and the latest Material Design components, Compose empowers you to build anything.
  • Highly performant: Out of the box, Compose offers native performance, delivering a delightful experience to your users.
  • Adaptive: Compose offers the easiest way to build adaptive apps that work across the range of Android form factors.
  • Productive: With powerful tools like Previews and Live Edit and the full expressiveness of Kotlin, teams tell us that they move much faster when building with Jetpack Compose, reducing the time to market.

Compose has matured into the standard for Android UI development—we believe that all Android UI should be built with Compose; we call this going Compose First. From today, we'll provide all APIs, libraries, tools and guidance in Compose. We now consider the View components that Compose replaces (components in the android.widget package) to be in maintenance mode. We have no plans to deprecate or remove View components and will continue to support them with critical bug fixes, but they will receive no new features.


View-based Jetpack Libraries
The same goes for View based libraries like Fragments, RecyclerView or Viewpager — we consider them complete and will only publish critical bugfixes. For a complete list of libraries now in maintenance mode, see here.


Tools
Any new Android Studio UI tools will be built for Jetpack Compose only. Existing view-based tools (such as the Navigation Editor and Layout Editor) are now in maintenance mode and will not receive new features.


Guidance
Documentation, codelabs, and samples will focus on building UI with Jetpack Compose. You can still find Views-specific documentation linked from pages that contain generic and Compose information, where relevant.

Happy Composing

We recommend that you build all new features with Compose and convert existing features when you touch them to gain the many Compose benefits. Check out our XML to Compose migration skill to help you convert existing layouts to Compose.


To learn about the latest Compose release, check out What’s new in the Jetpack Compose April ‘26 release blog and the roadmap for what’s planned ahead.


Thank you for all of the feature-requests and feedback that have helped shape Compose to become our recommended UI toolkit. As always, if you have any more feedback, let us know. Happy composing!

Explore this announcement and all Google I/O 2026 updates on io.google.

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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. Watch the developer keynote, and tune into the What’s New in Android tools talk for more information.    

You can now easily install Android CLI for use with Google Antigravity 2.0.

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. We're continuously working on increasing the difficulty of challenges we’re giving LLMs, to continue encouraging more useful improvements. 

4: Convert iOS apps to Android with the Migration Assistant in Android Studio

The Migration Assistant in Android Studio is designed to port apps from platforms like iOS, React Native, or web frameworks to native Android. By simply selecting an existing project, developers can have the agent intelligently map features, convert assets like storyboards and SVGs, and implement Android best practices using Jetpack Compose and our recommended Jetpack libraries. This effectively transforms what used to be weeks of manual porting into a streamlined agentic workflow that only takes hours. We shared a preview of the incoming feature in the developer keynote. 
A sneak peek of the Migration Assistant converting an iOS app into a native Android app

Building AI Into Your Apps

5: Building Intelligent Apps with generative AI

Generative AI enables you to create apps that are more intelligent, personalized, and agentic than ever before. This year, we introduced the latest advancements in on-device intelligence with a preview of Gemini Nano 4 for tasks like data extraction and summarization. We also expanded cloud capabilities via Firebase AI Logic, allowing developers to leverage Gemini models with robust grounding (including URL, Maps, and web search) to build smarter, more capable assistants. Furthermore, we unveiled our hybrid inference approach and the new Agent Development Kit (ADK) for Android, alongside communication protocols like AG-UI and A2UI that simplify the creation of autonomous, agentic experiences. To start integrating these powerful features, explore the developer documentation, and watch the technical deep dive session where we showcase all these technologies.

6: Experiment with AppFunctions today

AppFunctions is an Android platform API with an accompanying Jetpack library to simplify building Android MCP integrations. It empowers your apps to behave like on device MCP servers, contributing functions that act as tools for use by agents and assistants. AppFunctions integration with Gemini is currently in a private preview with trusted testers, and you can begin preparing your apps already. You can sign up for the Early Access Program and start experimenting using the API guidance, sample, and skill today.

The Future is Adaptive

7: Android is now Compose First; Views are now in maintenance mode.

Compose is our standard for UI development, and we are moving to a Compose-first approach for all future guidance and libraries. Building on five years of evolution, the latest releases deliver a more mature toolkit, from the highly customizable Styles API to refined shared element transitions and enhanced input support. These updates allow you to build beautiful, adaptive apps with less code and better performance. Learn more about what Compose-first means for Android Development in our blog post. 

Build Android UI with Compose

8: Building seamless Android experiences across devices with Jetpack Compose

The Android ecosystem is now Adaptive by Default, moving fluidly across phones, foldables, tablets, cars, XR, and expanding usages with Googlebook and connected displays. With over 580 million large-screen devices, and users on multiple devices spending up to 14x more on apps, the investment in adaptive design presents a massive opportunity. Jetpack Compose is the definitive engine for this transition, offering core tools like our latest Jetpack Navigation 3 release, new experimental Grid and FlexBox layouts, enhanced non-touch input support, and CameraX for correct camera previews across any window size. Furthermore, new skills in Android Studio make updating your existing app to adopt these adaptive patterns easier than ever. Notability’s Android debut sets a new standard for premium productivity apps. Built with Jetpack Compose, Navigation 3, and Kotlin Multiplatform, it delivers an intuitive, adaptive experience across devices.

9: Create seamless experiences for Googlebook

Last week we announced Googlebook, a high-performance laptop that provides a large-screen canvas for your existing apps. Building with adaptive principles today helps ensure your app will work on Googlebook. Get started by reviewing relevant design guidance and developer guidelines for desktop experiences. Try out the new Desktop Emulator available in the Android Studio Canary to to test your apps for this form factor today.

New Desktop Android Emulator

10: Unified widget development experience with Jetpack Glance

Android 17 marks a shift toward a single, Compose-based development model for all widgets. By unifying the experience across mobile, Wear OS, and cars through Jetpack Glance, you can soon scale UI components across the ecosystem with a familiar workflow.

The breakthrough this year is the integration of RemoteCompose. On mobile and cars, it powers high-fidelity animations, while on Wear OS, it allows Wear Widgets (formerly Tiles) to render complex UI logic natively on remote surfaces. This ensures peak performance on low-power hardware while allowing a cohesive user journey—like checking a flight status on your car dashboard and seeing gate change updates on your wrist.

Four widgets are shown cycling through in the Android Auto interface. A clock, a contact card, Google Home favorites and a photo.

11: Expand your reach on the road with Android for Cars
To help you expand your reach when you build in-car experiences, we're making it easier to build once and deliver your apps to Android Auto and Android Automotive OS. With the latest releases of the Car App Library, you can build customized, distraction-optimized templated media apps for both platforms. We're introducing new components and template capabilities to give you increased flexibility and more options for laying out content. Parked experiences are expanding too, with immersive video playback coming to Android Auto for phones running Android 17. You can easily adapt your video apps for these parked experiences; apply now to the early access program to publish in these beta categories and learn more about the latest updates in our blog.

12: Accelerate your development with Android XR Developer Preview 4

Inspired by the innovative experiences you’ve built for the platform, we’re continuing to mature our tools with Developer Preview 4 of the Android XR SDK. A key milestone in this journey is the transition of our core libraries, XR Runtime, Jetpack SceneCore, and ARCore for Jetpack XR, moving to Beta soon to provide a more stable and performant foundation. We are also accelerating hardware access through the Android XR Developer Catalyst Program, where you can apply for XREAL’s Project Aura, audio glasses, or display glasses developer kits. Watch The latest in Android XR session or read our blog to see how these updates help you build experiences across the ecosystem.

Early preview of the Geospatial API in ARCore for Jetpack XR, enabling high-precision anchoring of digital content to real-world locations.

13: Android is your new home for professional-grade media experiences

Android 17 streamlines the entire media lifecycle with a production-ready toolkit. High-fidelity capture is now simplified with the CameraXViewfinder Composable, which handles complex scaling and responsiveness on foldables and tablets. For post-production, the new Media3 AI Effects library provides a single interface for premium features like Magic Eraser and Studio Sound, automatically optimizing for the device's hardware.

The pipeline is completed by CodecDB, offering chipset-specific encoding recommendations to eliminate export noise, and a new Scrubbing Mode in ExoPlayer for ultra-smooth seeking. Whether you’re compositing multi-asset edits with Media3 Transformer or using the streamlined CastPlayer API, these updates ensure a professional-grade experience with significantly less development overhead.

Low Light Boost and Magic Eraser in action

14: Increase app discovery and engagement on Google TV

Pointer remotes, which enable motion-controlled input, will be a future way for users to interact with Google TV as it unlocks faster user navigation. App developers can start declaring support for pointing input to ensure their apps are discoverable on future TVs with pointer remotes. Additionally, the Engage SDK, formerly known as the Video Discovery API, optimizes Resumption, Entitlements, and Recommendations across all Google TV form factors to boost app discovery and engagement. It’s a great time to start onboarding the Engage SDK now, since the legacy Watch Next API, which has been powering your continue watching 1.0 experience, will lose support in the 2nd half of 2027. Get all the details in our blog.

15: Performance: the foundation of a great app experience

To help developers navigate memory limits in Android 17, we've launched a suite of optimization tools. The R8 Configuration Analyzer identifies keep rules that are bloating your binary, while ProfilingManager and the integrated LeakCanary in Android Studio streamline memory leak detection. Furthermore, the new Android Performance Analyzer offers advanced AI integration for complex trace analysis and automated SQL query generation to pinpoint performance bottlenecks.     

And The Latest on Driving Business Growth 

16: What’s new in Google Play

Today's updates from Google Play help expand your reach and scale your business with less complexity. We’re redefining Play Store discovery with an immersive, short-form video format called Play Shorts, while expanding your audience beyond the store with app discovery in the Gemini app on Android and web. Plus, we’re introducing powerful new capabilities like agentic catalog management for seamless bulk price and SKU updates, and using Gemini models to enable Play Console to pre-populate store listings from imported documents—making global localization effortless.

Gemini will provide users with app suggestions during a search

17: And of course, Android 17

Android 17 includes new performance & system architecture improvements (in addition to app memory limits) like a lock-free MessageQueue and a GC with more frequent, less intensive young-generation collections to ensure system-wide stability and smoother UIs. The new contact picker and eyedropper API help minimize the use of sensitive permissions and unnecessary access to user data.

Review the behavior changes to make sure your app is ready for Android 17, including background audio hardening and SMS OTP protection. Get ready to target Android 17 (API 37) with changes such as mandatory large-screen resizability, certificate transparency by default, and restricted local network access. You can start testing today by enrolling your device in the Beta or using the latest 17.0 emulator images.

One more thing. the third beta of our Android 17 quarterly platform release (QPR1) just came out, and it contains a minor SDK release to support a few features that just couldn't wait for QPR2.

Check out all of the Android & Play Content at Google I/O 

This was just a preview of some of the updates for Android developers at Google I/O. Tune into What’s New in Android for the latest news and announcements and follow Google I/O for much more over the following week!

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Build native Android apps in Google AI Studio

Posted by Emma-Louise Leavey, Group Product Manager and Mike Taylor-Cai, Product Manager


Starting today Google AI Studio can build entire Android apps for you in minutes from just a prompt. You don't need to install any software or configure any libraries, which significantly lowers the barrier to development. Whether you’re a seasoned developer looking to prototype at lightning speed or a creator building your first-ever mobile experience, you can now go from a single prompt to a high-quality, Kotlin-based Android app in AI Studio. You can easily install the app on your device, share it with others for testing, or send it to Android Studio for any further development.

The power of native Android

While AI has made it easy to generate web-based apps, people want more on their mobile devices. They expect the beautiful and usable modern app design and capabilities that come with native Android user experiences, built with the Kotlin programming language using Jetpack Compose, the official and recommended toolkit for Android development. Native Android apps bring the reliability of offline support, continuous background services, and the deep integration of hardware sensors like GPS, Bluetooth, and NFC. We've brought the technology that enables you to quickly create new projects with Gemini in Android Studio directly into the web-based AI Studio. Now, you get the best of both worlds: the ease of a prompt-based interface paired with the power of the Android SDK, all in your browser, no installation required.

A seamless, end-to-end workflow

We have streamlined the entire development lifecycle so you can focus on your idea: 

1. Create your app and iterate in the cloud: Use the embedded Android Emulator directly in your browser to preview and interact with your app as it’s being built. No heavy SDKs to download, no local setup required.

Use the embedded Android Emulator to create and edit Android Apps right in the web browser

2. Install instantly: Connect your Android phone using a USB cable and install your app directly from AI Studio using the integrated Android Debug Bridge (adb).

Install the app on your Android device

3. Streamlined Publish to Google Play: Using your Google Play developer account, you can now publish your app directly from AI Studio for testing. AI Studio will automatically create your app record, package the bundle, and upload it to an internal testing track in Google Play Developer Console. Your app is available for you to install within minutes, and you can automatically update your app on your device as you develop it further in AI Studio. 

Publish the app to an internal test track in Google Play

Seamless app development handoff 
As you iterate on your app in AI Studio, you may find you need more advanced Android tools or support for a wider variety of Android device types. To move beyond the browser, you can seamlessly hand off your project to Android Studio by downloading a ZIP file or exporting it directly to GitHub.

Download zip file of Android app project files

When transitioning to a team environment or local development, you can leverage any IDE or agent you prefer. For a specialized experience, we recommend Gemini in Android Studio, which features models designed with Android in mind, or Antigravity, which integrates Android CLI commands into Google’s agentic development platform. This workflow makes building high-quality apps more accessible while giving you total flexibility in how you use AI to scale your project.

Start building today

To ensure a safe, high-quality ecosystem from day one, we have focused our initial release on specific capabilities including:
  • Personal utilities and simple social apps: You can rapidly prototype single or multi-screen apps, such as habit trackers, study quizzes, or event itineraries.
  • Hardware-enabled experiences: Because you are building native apps, you can leverage device features like the Camera, GPS/Location, Accelerometer and Bluetooth using the native Android APIs, letting you optimize hardware-level performance.
  • AI-powered experiences: You can create apps that feature Gemini API integrations, seamlessly embedding powerful AI capabilities directly into your mobile experience.

What’s Next?

We are moving fast to expand what’s possible for creators in AI Studio. Here is a sneak peek at what is coming soon:
  • Managing Google Play Test Tracks: Coming soon, we will be adding the ability to invite testers to try your app directly from AI Studio. 
  • Firebase integrations: Out-of-the-box support for Firestore, Firebase Auth, Firebase App Check and other tooling critical for Android developers is coming soon.

Head over to Google AI Studio right now to start building. Here is some inspiration to get you started… 

Turn your Google Pixel Watch into an aviation assistant
Prompt:
Build a small airplane "6-pack" instrument app for Google Pixel Watch. The 6 instruments should include attitude indicator, airspeed indicator, altimeter, turn coordinator, vertical speed indicator, and heading indicator. Use the Google Pixel Watch's sensors to power the instruments and display them clearly. Display one instrument at a time on the display. Swiping to the left or right should cycle through the instruments.


Interactive Harmonium app on Google Pixel Fold
Prompt:
Build a Harmonium app for Pixel Fold devices, which plays like the instrument based on the hinge angle and touch gestures. The app should simulate the bellows and reeds accurately.

An Android app for guitarists to become better musicians by jamming to backing tracks 
Prompt:
Build an Android guitar practice companion app that features a two-tab navigation system: 'Fretboard' and 'Library'.

The 'Fretboard' primary screen must contain an interactive guitar neck UI that visually maps out user-selected root notes, musical scales, and chords. Above the fretboard, implement a WebView-based YouTube player configured to play embedded videos inline. Additionally, include an AI generation feature that uses Retrofit to call Gemini Lyria 3 to create custom, 30-second backing tracks based on the user's currently selected key and scale. The generated audio files and their metadata must be saved locally using a database and displayed as a list in the 'Library' tab, where users can delete or play them.

Finally, implement a persistent, globally visible mini audio player at the bottom of the screen, complete with play/pause toggles, a progress slider for seeking, and timestamp text, allowing the user to seamlessly practice on the fretboard tab while listening to their tracks.
We are looking forward to seeing what you build next!

Explore this announcement and all Google I/O 2026 updates on io.google.
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Increasing app discovery and engagement on Google TV

Posted by Paul Lammertsma, Developer Relations Engineer



With over 300 million monthly active devices across Google TV and Android TV, it’s clear that the living room is a massive, distinct platform for apps to accelerate growth. Today, we’re excited to share Google TV features and developer tools designed to increase the discoverability of your content and prepare your app for future TV experiences.

Drive discovery and engagement with Gemini

Last year, we brought our AI voice assistant, Gemini, to our platform, so that people can easily find what to watch, learn something new on the big screen, and get everyday tasks done with just their voice.

Since launch, we’ve made improvements to how Gemini provides tailored responses to questions. Gemini shares a mix of visuals, videos, and text to help users find what they need, when they need it. For our streaming partners, Gemini is a helpful discovery engine—pulling from your app's metadata to surface your relevant content to viewers.

Declare support for pointing modality

The TV experience that we once knew is changing. Gemini is changing the way we discover and stream content with voice, but how we use the remote is evolving, too.

Pointer remotes bring motion-controlled input to the big screen, unlocking faster user navigation across the Google TV Home page and within content-heavy apps. To ensure your app is ready for this shift and provides a great experience for all users, now is the time to start thinking about pointing input. Here’s how to get started:

1. Adapt your TV app UI Library

You’ll need support for hover states, scrollable containers, and cursor clicks to enable pointer remote interactions for your app on Google TV. While implementation varies by UI stack, Jetpack Compose streamlines this transition, as most core components handle these multi-modal interactions natively out of the box.

  1. Hover state: Every focusable element on your screen (buttons, movie posters, setting toggles) needs a clear visual feedback mechanism for a hover state. This is often subtler than a focus state but critical for feedback.
  2. Scrollable containers: Pointer remotes will also have a small circular touchpad for scrolling. Users can use this touchpad to scroll up or down, or left or right in your app. Your app will need to respond to touch events to scroll.
  3. Cursor clicks: Many TV apps today expect a simple D-pad OKAY button “click.” With a pointer remote, a user may “click” on an element that’s not the D-pad focus state, but is instead from a hovered state (similar to a mouse click).

2. Test pointing interactions with a mouse today

To see how your app handles hover, scroll, and clicks, simply connect a bluetooth mouse or wired mouse to your Google TV. Keep in mind that a mouse has more precise control, since users are closer to the screen and typically rest the mouse in a stable position. Pointer remotes can often be less precise, since users are sometimes 10 feet away from the screen, making rough gestures with the remote from their couch. As a TV designer or developer, you can mitigate this lack of input precision by having larger hover targets for elements.

3. Declare TV app support for pointer remotes on Google Play

Finally, tell Google Play that your TV app is designed to work with a pointer. This ensures that users with pointer remotes will be able to easily find, install, and interact with your app.

Within your AndroidManifest.xml, declare the meta-data tag, android.software.leanback.supports_touch. This tag informs the platform that your TV app “spatially supports touch,” since pointer remotes simulate touch events from a distance.

AndroidManifest.xml

<manifest ...>
    <!-- Signal whether the app is adaptive or built just for TV -->
    <uses-feature android:name="android.software.leanback" android:required="true|false" />

    <!-- Ensure the app can be installed on conventional TVs -->
    <uses-feature android:name="android.hardware.touchscreen" android:required="false" />

    <!-- Signal whether the app supports pointer remotes -->
    <meta-data android:name="android.software.leanback.supports_touch" android:value="true|false"/>

    <application ...>
        ...
    </application>
</manifest>

Tips:

  • The android.software.leanback feature declaration indicates that your app supports D-pad navigation and is intended for distribution only on TV devices via Google Play.
  • The new software attribute of android.software.leanback.supports_touch declares that in addition to D-pad, you have ensured that your TV app works well for pointer/cursor experiences via mouse (of today) and pointer remotes (of future).
  • If you haven't already, now is the time to adopt Jetpack Compose. Hover, scroll, and clicks are common input modalities that are supported on various form factors, and building your app with an adaptive UI framework enables code reusability and reduced maintenance.

Onboard the Engage SDK

The Engage SDK, formerly known as the Video Discovery API, optimizes Resumption, Entitlements, and Recommendations across all Google TV form factors to boost app discovery and engagement.

  • Resumption: Partners can easily display a user's paused video within the 'Continue Watching' row from the Home page.
  • Entitlements: The Engage SDK streamlines entitlement management, which matches app content to user eligibility. Users appreciate this because they can enjoy personalized recommendations without needing to manually update all their subscription details. This allows partners to connect with users across multiple discovery points on Google TV.
  • Recommendations: The Engage SDK even highlights personalized recommendations based on content that users watched inside apps.

It’s a great time to start onboarding the Engage SDK now, since the legacy Watch Next API, which has been powering your continue watching 1.0 experience, will lose support in the 2nd half of 2027. To get started, head to goo.gle/engage-tv to learn more.

We're excited to see how our latest Gemini experience and developer tools will optimize your discovery and drive user engagement on our platform.

Explore this announcement and all Google I/O 2026 updates on io.google.
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Android CLI Now Stable 1.0: Accelerate developing for Android using any agent

Posted by Simona Milanovic and Ben Trengrove, Developer Relations Engineers

As Android developers, you have many choices when it comes to the agents, tools, command-line interfaces (CLI), and LLMs you use for app development. Whether you use Gemini in Android Studio, Antigravity 2.0, Antigravity CLI, or third-party agents like Anthropic's Claude Code or OpenAI'sCodex, our mission remains the same: to ensure that high-quality Android development is possible everywhere.

At Google I/O ‘26, we shared the latest leaps forward in agentic development, and showcased some of the newest capabilities of Android CLI—now stable at version 1.0 and ready for all Android developers to use. From new skills to enabling agent access to powerful Android Studio capabilities, we’re giving your agents the right tools to build alongside you.

If you’re already using Android CLI and want to jump into using all the new features, just run android update. Otherwise, read further to learn more about how we’re making the agents you choose be better at building for Android.

Android development unlocked for Antigravity

Google Antigravity now includes an optional bundle of Android resources—including the Android CLI and skills—that you can install. You can either install the bundle during onboarding after installation, or later from the Settings > Customizations > Build With Google Plugins menu.

This provides Antigravity with all the powerful tools and knowledge of Android CLI, enabling it to perform the core tasks necessary for Android app development more easily and efficiently—from creating projects to deploying your app on a new Android virtual device.

You can now easily install Android CLI for use with Google Antigravity 2.0.

Unlocking Android Studio capabilities for any agent

Android CLI provides a lightweight interface for AI Agents to perform tasks and retrieve knowledge about Android development. However, there's benefits to specialization — Android Studio contains over a decade of Android expertise, built to handle even the most complex Android projects. This includes Android Studio's powerful static analysis engine, refactoring tools, dependency management, UI design and rendering libraries, and more. AI Agents can now tap into Android Studio's tools to gain many of these same capabilities.

Your agents can now use Android CLI to access powerful capabilities of Android Studio.

The latest version of Android CLI introduces the new android studio command. This enables the agent of your choice to leverage the deep, contextual capabilities of Android Studio to better understand and perform actions on an open Android project. By running Android Studio alongside your preferred agent with Android CLI, your agent’s tasks can more efficiently navigate the codebase to produce more precise code changes. And, when you use Android CLI to create and iterate on your project, transitioning to Android Studio is much easier, so that you can use the purpose built tools—such as, performance profilers, Compose Previews, and Android Device Streaming—to get that production-grade polish.

When you have a project open in the latest preview version of Android Studio Quail, you (or your agent) can run the following command to check whether Android CLI has a connection established with your open project:

$ android studio check
pid: 32942
version: Android Studio
Projects:
    READY     JetSet /Users/adarshf/AndroidStudioProjects/jetset-main

From there, the agents can use the android studio command to access powerful IDE tools to interact with projects more efficiently. Key commands include:

  • analyze-file: Analyzes a file for errors and warnings using the editor's built-in inspections.
  • find-declaration: Finds the exact definition site of a symbol (class, method, variable, field, constant, or Android resource/color) across the project using semantic resolution.
  • find-usages: Finds all references and declarations of a symbol (class, method, variable, or Android resource) across the entire project using semantic analysis.
  • render-compose-preview: Renders a Jetpack Compose UI Preview and returns a path to the image and UI hierarchy if successful.
  • version-lookup: Get the latest information about which versions for specified app dependencies are available in common repositories, such as the Google Maven repository. By providing a programmatic solution, dependency management is less tedious and much less prone to flakiness.
  • open-file: Opens a file directly in Android Studio. This is useful if the agent wants to direct your attention to view Compose Previews, performance traces, or other specific files in the IDE.

For example, agents can now run the following commands to render a Compose preview for a new layout for your Android app, and then open the previews in Android Studio for you to take advantage of seeing multiple Compose Previews side by side and make AI-assisted edits right from the IDE.

$ android studio find-declaration HotelDetailScreen
$ android studio analyze-file .../JetPacker/feature/detail/src/main/java/com/example/jetset/feature/detail/HotelDetailScreen.kt
$ android studio open-file feature/detail/src/main/java/com/example/jetset/feature/detail/HotelDetailScreen.kt

To learn more about how to use these commands, run android help. And, to make sure your agents understand how to work with this tool, make sure to update the Android CLI skill by running android init.

More ways to get started

To make integrating Android CLI into your environments as seamless as possible, we’re making it available in more ways. You can now download and install Android CLI using more package managers: apt-get, winget, and homebrew. For example, you can run the following to install Android CLI using winget:

winget install -e --id Google.AndroidCLI

We’ve also updated the installation to a user-local directory, by default. You can find the commands for all supported operating systems plus additional download options on the Android CLI page.

Support for Journeys

Journeys are natural language descriptions of core user experiences.

 

(sped up) An agent running a Journey it generated for an app.

Agents can run these journeys using the Android CLI to navigate your app exactly like a user would. This unlocks entirely new ways to test, validate, or collect data across the critical experiences of your app, all driven by natural language and executed by your agent.

Expanding Android skills

To help models better understand and execute specific patterns that follow our best practices, we are continuing to expand our library of Android skills. We’re shipping new skills that make Android development everywhere more capable, efficient, and productive:

  • Display Glasses and Jetpack Compose Glimmer for XR: Provides guidelines for developing projected applications for Android Display Glasses using the Jetpack Compose Glimmer UI toolkit.
  • Migration to CameraX: Helps you migrate legacy Android camera implementations (Camera1 or raw Camera2 APIs) to CameraX.
  • Perfetto SQL: Translates natural language data prompts into Perfetto SQL queries and executes them against a local trace file.
  • Adaptive UI: Instructions to make or update an app's UI so that it adapts to different Android devices
  • Testing setup: Creates a basic testing strategy.
  • Styles: Helps with adoption of the new Jetpack Compose Style API for new components, and supports migration to Styles API. 
  • AppFunctions: Analyzes Android codebases to recommend and implement new AppFunctions, and refines KDoc documentation for Model Context Protocol optimization.

You can add these new skills to your workflow directly from the command line. To help your agents understand and use Android CLI right away, you can initialize your environment and install the base android-cli skill by running:

android init

From there, you can browse and set up your agent workflow by searching for the exact capabilities your agent needs:

android skills list

Once you've found the right skill, install it to your environment by running:

android skills add –skill=<skill-name>

Get started today

To download the stable 1.0 release of the Android CLI, explore the new tools, and browse the complete documentation, head over to d.android.com/tools/agents today!  Also, make sure you update to the latest preview version of Android Studio to unlock the latest features that Android CLI offers. We can't wait to see what you build with Android CLI 1.0 and how these new features supercharge your daily workflows. Join our vibrant community on LinkedIn, Medium, YouTube, or X and  share your feedback.

Explore this announcement and all Google I/O 2026 updates on io.google.

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Build for the future with the Android XR Developer Catalyst Program — Apply now!

Posted by Android XR Team



The Android XR ecosystem is expanding, and we’re committed to supporting developers who will build its next great experiences. Today, we’re opening applications for the Android XR Developer Catalyst Program, a dedicated initiative to accelerate the development of Android XR apps ready to launch within the next year.

This program is designed to provide the resources, hardware, and grants to help you build and scale innovative experiences across wired XR glasses, like XREAL’s Project Aura, and intelligent eyewear (audio and display glasses). We are especially interested in seeing innovative experiences across media, gaming, productivity, and health, but we welcome any unique use case that helps users expand what's possible.

Why join the catalyst program?

We want to help developers navigate common barriers to entry for XR development by providing:

  • Development Kits: Get early access to hardware development kits for wired XR glasses (XREAL’s Project Aura) and / or intelligent eyewear (audio and display glasses).

  • Technical support: Gain access to specialized technical resources and support forums specifically designed to help you prepare your app for Google Play.

  • Grant Opportunities: Submit a request and you may be eligible to receive a non-recoupable grant to accelerate your development.

Ready to start building?

Applications are open to developers looking to publish apps for the Android XR ecosystem in the next 6-12 months. You can build with Kotlin and the Jetpack XR SDK, or with Unity, Unreal Engine or Godot. If you need a spark of inspiration, you can check out existing XR Experiments and Samples to see how you can use the SDK for everything from spatial music to navigation.

Once you have your concept ready, be sure to submit your application by June 30th by 11:59PM PDT. We can’t wait to see what you build.

Start Your Application

Explore this announcement and all Google I/O 2026 updates on io.google.

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