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I/O 2026

At Google I/O 2026, we shared how we’re making AI more helpful for everyone. See everything we announced.

Source: AI


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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 Studio I/O Edition: What’s new in Android Developer tools

Posted by Matthew Warner, Google Product Manager


This year at Google I/O we are going beyond iterative changes, towards a fundamental shift in how apps are built. Our newest tools are built for the agentic era with features that boost productivity for you as an Android developer AND supercharge the AI agents you deploy in your codebase. So, whether you are building exclusively with AI or you prefer being the architect of every line of code, our tools will keep you ahead of the curve.

As we move from "AI-assisted" to "Agentic" development, we’re making it easier than ever to turn a spark of an idea into a high-quality production app with significantly less developer effort.

So what’s new with Android developer tools? We will cover 3 main areas in this blog:

  • Let your agent handle it: Whatever development task you are working on, the Android Studio agent can help: from planning the app architecture and design, to writing code, to unit testing and bug fixing.

  • Any AI provider, anywhere you build: In Android Studio, you can use any model and we even help guide you to the best performing ones. Choose any of the top remote models from Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, or if you need to run locally - Gemma 4 is our most capable and efficient local model! And with Android CLI, you can build Android apps faster and easier using the agents and developer environments of your choice.

  • As always, performance and quality remain top priorities: We continue to invest in the Android developer tools you love: from the Emulator, to Profilers, performance analyzers, and more!

1: Let your agent handle it

Agent skills

Android Studio now supports Agent Skills, modular instruction sets that ground LLMs in specialized workflows and domain-specific knowledge. By adding skills to your project, you can teach the agent to follow specific best practices, architecture patterns, or library workflows. This enables more accurate, context-aware code generation and automated skill activation for an appropriate task, ensuring the agent acts as an expert. We’ve bundled many of the top Android and Firebase agent skills in the latest Android Studio Canary build, so you can skip straight to building!

Skills in Agent Mode

You can create your own skill, or use Android CLI to install our official skills - a repository that covers some of the most common workflows that some Android developers and LLMs may struggle with. They help models better understand and execute specific patterns that follow our best practices and guidance on Android development, such as XML to Compose migration, Edge-to-edge, Navigation 3, and more. You can even build for Android XR, starting with a beautiful Display Glasses app with Jetpack Compose Glimmer. Official Android skills are automatically bundled with the latest Android Studio so the Agent is ready to build!

Build full-stack apps with Firebase in Agent Mode

Firebase services like Auth and Firestore databases can now be enabled directly within Agent Mode in Android Studio using the Agent Skills for Firebase. Your agent will be able to complete Firebase integration and configure backend services. This integration empowers you to build robust, full-stack Android applications without ever leaving your IDE!

Building a full-stack app with Firebase via Agent Mode

Parallel conversations

You can now run multiple conversations with Agent Mode in parallel. In one conversation, run tests and while you are waiting, you can kick off planning mode for a new feature in your app while using a third conversation thread to write documentation for your app. These improvements will save you time and improve your productivity. 

Parallel conversations in Agent Mode

A more capable New Project Agent

Android Studio's New Project Agent has evolved into a powerful full-stack development tool, utilizing a multi-step execution plan and an autonomous "generation loop" that self-corrects build errors and configures dependencies across multiple files. This advanced capability is significantly amplified by its new integration with Firebase Agent Skills, allowing developers to seamlessly build, debug, and deploy complete full-stack applications directly from a single prompt to final production.

Building an app with New Project Agent

Additionally, it now offers support for large screens. You can scaffold your project with layouts, navigation, and components optimized for tablets, foldables, and laptop devices from the get-go. It has additional logic to test your app on large-screen emulators if you have one enabled. Simply configure the required device in the Android Emulator and the Agent can test it out!

Build large screen apps for foldables and tablet devices

2: Any AI provider, anywhere you build

Build Android apps in Google AI Studio

Google AI Studio now features full Android app development capabilities. Users can generate new applications, preview them instantly via an embedded Android Emulator, and deploy them directly to physical devices using ADB over USB. Additionally, developers can publish straight to Google Play; AI Studio handles the app record creation, bundles the package, and uploads it to an internal testing track. For advanced development and production readiness, projects can be exported as a ZIP file and opened seamlessly in Android Studio. To get started, visit Google AI Studio today and start building!

Google AI Studio build mode with Android framework

Android CLI helps you build faster, more efficiently with any agent

Android CLI enables you to build apps using any agent, LLM, and tool of your choice. Android CLI is designed to help AI agents build faster, and use less tokens when compared to only using generic LLM tools. By grounding agents with Android Knowledge Base and Android skills, you can now have your agent of choice follow the latest best practices across any coding environment.

Additionally, when using the latest Canary version of Android Studio Quail, Android CLI enables your agent to leverage powerful capabilities of the IDE, such as analyzing files for issues or finding symbol declarations. Google Antigravity 2.0 now offers official support for Android development with Android CLI.


Android CLI enables any agent with the tools and knowledge to build for Android.

Google AI plan

You can now use your Google AI Pro or Ultra plan to get access to dedicated capacity and higher rate limits for Gemini in Android Studio. This is especially helpful for long agentic Android development sessions, which can require using more tokens. Android Studio detects your subscription automatically when you log in with your Google account.  

Use your Google AI plan in Agent Mode

Gemma 4 for local code assist and on-device AI

Gemma 4 is a state-of-the-art local model trained for Android development. It’s our most efficient local model and is capable of complex multi-step agentic coding in Android Studio. It’s ideal for developers who require data privacy, offline access, or have run into quota issues with other models.


And now in the latest Canary build, you can download and run Gemma 4 directly from the IDE, without needing to set up an external server.

Model selector in Agent Mode

Bring your own model to Android Studio

Android Studio allows developers to bring any model they choose into the IDE for agentic AI assistance. Power your workflow with models like Gemini, GPT, and Claude or use a local model like Gemma 4. This flexibility offers developers greater control over performance, privacy, and cost.

Settings, Model Provider

Android Bench highlights the top models

Earlier this year we launched Android Bench, the benchmark and leaderboard designed to evaluate how effectively LLMs handle real-world Android development tasks. The goal is to accelerate AI improvements, leading to more helpful models for you to use for AI assistance, which will lead to better quality apps for Android users.

You asked us to evaluate open models, so we added them to the leaderboard to help you see how LLMs with additional privacy and offline access measure up. We are also working on significantly increasing the difficulty of challenges we’re giving LLMs, to continue encouraging improvements. This includes creating long running tasks, which take a typical Android engineer multiple days to complete.

Latest results as of May 18th 2026, check here for updates

3: As always, performance and quality remain top priorities:

Test multi-device interactions with the Android Emulator

The Android Emulator now features a new networking stack that enables zero-configuration, peer-to-peer connectivity between multiple virtual devices on the same host machine. This update eliminates the need for manual port forwarding, allowing developers to easily test multi-device scenarios like local multiplayer gaming, file sharing, and companion app pairing. By creating a shared virtual network backplane, the Android Emulator provides a more stable and consistent environment for building complex, interconnected app experiences across different form factors.

Multi -device testing with the Android Emulator

Android Debug Bridge Wi-Fi 2.0

ADB Wi-Fi 2.0 offers significantly more reliable wireless debugging. With the latest ADB command line tool from Android Platform Tools v37 and an Android 17 device, you can now change networks, shut down your machine, and go about your typical day and your devices will stay connected. Additionally, devices with wireless debugging enabled will automatically show in Android Studio’s Device Manager, streaming the pairing process and making it easier than ever to connect Android phones, watches, and more.


Pair devices with Wi-Fi

Android Studio now lets you publish to Google Play for testing

Android Studio now gives you the ability to upload new releases of your app directly to Google Play Console test tracks. You can do this by selecting a new option to continue to “Publish for Testing” at the end of the Generate Signed App Bundle flow. This integration supports uploading an initial release of a brand-new app to Play Console’s internal test track. You can also use this feature to upload releases to existing apps to test tracks. You need to be registered on Google Play Console to take advantage of this functionality. Read the ‘What’s new in Google Play’ blog to learn about all the updates from Play at I/O.

Upload App Bundle to Google Play

Android developer verification support

You can now see your app's registration status right in Android Studio when you generate a signed App Bundle or APK. Seeing this information in Android Studio enables you to address registration issues early and ensure your apps are ready before the verification requirement goes into effect for certified Android devices starting in September 2026.

App registration status with Android developer verification

Memory leak detection with LeakCanary

Memory leaks in Android occur when your code holds onto an object's reference long after its life cycle has ended. This prevents the Garbage Collector (GC) from reclaiming that memory, eventually leading to sluggish performance or OutOfMemoryError (OOM).

The Android Studio LeakCanary profiler task significantly enhances developer productivity by enabling the analysis and inspection of memory leak traces directly on the desktop development environment rather than on the mobile device. Furthermore, Android Studio streamlines troubleshooting by providing tools like “Go to declaration” to map the leak analysis directly to the codebase, allowing developers to quickly locate and resolve memory leaks.

Starting from the Android Studio Quail 1 release, you can now also request Gemini to review the memory leak for you using the “Fix with Agent” button.

Review memory leaks identified via LeakCanary through the “Fix with Agent” button

Android Performance Analyzer (APA)

Android Performance Analyzer (APA) is the next generation of performance profiler for Android and provides a cohesive analysis of CPU, GPU, memory, and power usage for your apps and games running on Android 12+ devices. APA is engineered for reliability and performance with trace rendering speeds which are up to 26x faster from previous tooling.

Android Performance Analyzer (APA) running in Android Studio showing two traces side by side

APA integrates natively with AI agents and offers two new skills: Perfetto SQL skill and the Perfetto Analysis skill, which helps with questions like "Why is my app startup slow?"

Analysis of traces using Perfetto Analysis skill

R8 Configuration Analyzer

R8 is one of the best ways to improve your app’s performance and reduce memory footprint. The performance benefits you can get from R8 are directly correlated to how much of your codebase R8 is able to optimize. We’ve introduced a new tool to help you to unlock the maximum optimization from R8 – the R8 Configuration Analyzer. It provides insights into R8 configuration quality and how your keep rules impact your app. We have also introduced three scores that show how much of your codebase is available for optimization, obfuscation, and shrinking.

Suggested fixes for crashes with Agent integration in AQI

The App Quality Insights tool window is now integrated with the AI agent to analyze crash data along with your source code to provide detailed explanations and suggest potential fixes. After selecting a crash in the App Quality Insights tool window, navigate to the Insights tab and click “See more” to see a detailed explanation of the crash. Click “Fix with AI” to have the agent suggest code changes that you can review and accept.

App Quality Insights and Fix with AI

Get started

Android Studio is closing the gap between ideation and implementation. With powerful tools built for agentic development, it’s never been easier to build and ship high-quality Android apps.

Download the latest Android Studio Quail preview build and try these new features. As always, your feedback is crucial to us. Check known issues, report bugs, and be part of our vibrant community on LinkedIn, YouTube, or X. Happy coding!

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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Introducing Android Performance Analyzer : The Next Evolution in Profiling for Android

By Simon Cooke, Developer Relations Engineer (X) and Mayank Jain, Product Manager (X)

What is Android Performance Analyzer?

Android Performance Analyzer (APA) is Android’s new profiler and performance analysis tool for the Android mobile ecosystem. 

APA is intended as a profiling tool for any developer building for Android who needs to make their app or game run better and faster. It is helpful for all performance-minded engineers, especially those using Vulkan in their game engines who want to squeeze every bit of performance out of their code.

APA aims to be the tool that helps you optimize apps and games for all modern Android devices and simplifies your most common workflows, with a simple interface that anyone on your team can quickly learn and be productive. 

Available today in open beta is APA’s new System Profiler that you can use to analyze the CPU, GPU, Memory, and power usage of your app or game - and see how it interacts with system behavior.

Developed in collaboration with Samsung Austin Research Center (SARC) and LunarG, APA relies on Perfetto for system tracing and its upcoming frame profiling/debugging features (stay tuned!) are powered by LunarG’s GFXReconstruct technology for graphics capture and replay.

Devices running Android 12+ will provide the best experience for capturing system-wide performance and GPU counters and render stages.

We’re also working across the Android ecosystem with our esteemed industry partners to bring more profiling & optimization related data into APA. 


Android Performance Analyzer

How to get Android Performance Analyzer

APA ships in two different forms, and you can download whichever one suits your needs best

The standalone desktop app is intended to be used without an Android Studio project or Gradle build - and provides deep customization of recording configuration, built-in Vulkan layers for graphics analysis, deep inspection of GPU counters and much more.

APA is also cross-platform: works natively on Windows, MacOS, and Linux.

Features in this release

Basic profiling functionality

Capturing your profile data

You don’t always want to take a capture immediately at application or game launch. APA allows you to choose, and capture traces from your device at launch or triggered manually. The user interface allows you to select which GPU counters and other data is captured in a trace - and if you have more complex needs, you can provide your own custom Perfetto configuration.

Deep-Dive System Analysis

With APA, you can analyze the entire system’s behavior in one view. For example, you can easily examine CPU cores - both their frequencies and the work scheduled on them or inspect processes & their thread activity.

For graphics-heavy apps, APA provides GPU performance counter data across hardware from Qualcomm, Arm, Imagination, and Samsung. You can even track battery and power consumption to see the impact of your code on power consumption.

To understand exactly where frames are spending time, SurfaceFlinger events provide deep visibility into the rendering and display composition pipeline, from initial code acquisition to final display. And with the new screenshots feature, you can visually scrub through to easily find the exact areas where you want to focus your attention.

You can open existing Perfetto traces, zoom through the timeline for precise detail, and use rulers to measure the duration of work and events. APA also lets you bookmark and annotate interesting findings, and you can pin critical tracks to the top of your screen to keep your focus exactly where it needs to be as you optimize.

Workflow features

Tabbed interface and split windows: You can open multiple traces in side-by-side tabs or split a single trace into two windows to compare different regions of the same trace simultaneously.

Tabbed interface showing two traces side-by-side.

Project-based workflow: APA uses a project model that allows you to keep track of multiple traces from the project sidebar. This is especially useful for gathering the results of A/B testing and longitudinal tests, and keeping all of your results together for comparison & quick access purposes.

The new project window helps you manage multiple traces.

Navigate visually using screenshots: APA lets you capture screenshots during a trace (without any noticeable performance overhead) to home in on areas where you saw something affect performance by scrubbing through the timeline. Or even just to get your bearings.

Scrubbing the timeline using screenshots for navigation (trace taken from NetMarble’s Seven Deadly Sins: Origin).

Persistent view customizations: When you pin or vertically resize tracks, we save those customizations so that they persist the next time you open the trace.

Analysis tools & new skills for AI agents

Vulkan debug trace markers for render passes: We support Vulkan debug annotations for render passes - which allow you to view Render Pass names you set from your codebase directly in the tracks and slices shown in APA.

This immensely helps you to make logical connections between the workloads you see in the profiler to where they are originating from in your codebase.

Vulkan Debug Markers allow you to keep track of what kind of work is being performed in your trace.

Use AI to build SQL queries for custom analysis work: APA supports trace analysis via SQL queries and ships with a new Perfetto SQL skill for use with your favorite AI agents. This makes it easier to build queries without needing to remember Perfetto SQL schemas or the SQL syntax.



AI helps you build SQL queries to perform custom analysis on traces.

Ask Gemini to analyze traces for you: We’ve also added another Perfetto Analysis skill to answer high-level questions for you - like “Why is my app startup slow?” - helping you to find starting points when analyzing complex traces, using your favorite AI agent to pinpoint the answers.

Agentic trace analysis in Android Performance Analyzer

FPS and Frame Duration times : You can review the FPS and Frame duration time at a glance in the tracks to correlate it with other activity happening in your trace. 


FPS and Frame timing tracks in APA

Speed & robustness improvements

Speed and robustness improvements: Rendering a trace is now typically 6x to 26x faster than Android GPU Inspector, and APA is significantly more stable when working with large traces.

Case studies

We’ve worked with our early access partners to create detailed case studies showcasing how APA could be used to improve performance for Vulkan apps & games.

The Forge Interactive

The Forge used Android Performance Analyzer to identify the need to batch calls to vkCmdBindDescriptorSets, which reduced CPU setup costs by ~50%. This, in turn, slowed heat production on their device by 2-3x, leading to longer session times. They also used APA to identify opportunities to move font and UI rendering work over to the GPU, improving scalability.

You can read the full case study from The Forge here.

Note: This case study demonstrates how to use custom SQL queries in the profiler to generate a total rendering cost metric.

The Forge case study showing frames presented consistently at a stable 30 FPS using APA

NetMarble – Seven Deadly Sins: Origin

Netmarble used Android Performance Analyzer to fine-tune their game Seven Deadly Sins: Origin, focusing particularly on improving performance by making changes to the precision of their shaders, and exploring the impact of upscaling on the performance of their renderer.

This allowed them to reduce the GPU cost of rendering some scenes by up to 90%. 

Read the full NetMarble case study here.

Netmarble validating pre- and post-optimization performance changes using APA for their game: Seven Deadly Sins: Origin

Profiling model complexity in Google’s Filament engine

Google has been improving the Filament glTF Viewer, our physically-based rendering engine.

We spent some time digging into the viewer with a variety of scenes, and showed how to use Android Performance Analyzer to identify scenes that are too complex for the GPU, and how to trim them down to hit a target 60FPS, by improving texture compression and optimizing geometry. Memory consumption was also reduced in this process.

You can read our exploration of Filament here.


Screenshot showing GPU wait time was reduced from 25ms to 20ms by introducing dynamic resolution and measuring it through APA

Try out the Android Performance Analyzer Beta today!

The Android Performance Analyzer is available for you to try out and use today:

This is beta software, which means that you might run into an occasional bug – please report it to us if you find any (Help Menu > Submit a bug report).

We’re excited to see how you use the new Android Performance Analyzer, and how it will help your project’s performance and reliability.

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