Google Flights and Search trends told us what’s on everyone’s mind this year as it relates to summer travel.
The latest tools from Google can help you plan trips, find a great deal and explore your next destination.
As part of improving security for Google Ads accounts, the Google Ads API will start requiring Multi-factor authentication (MFA) for Google Ads API users. These important security updates will start rolling out from April 21, 2026, and will be enabled for all users over the next few weeks.
What is MFA?
MFA, also known as 2-step verification or 2SV, is an important security measure. In addition to your password, MFA requires another proof of identity, known as an authentication factor, to successfully sign in to an account. By requiring the second factor, you’re making it significantly harder for unauthorized users to breach your account, and a compromised password alone is not enough to gain access.
What is changing?
Once this change goes live, users following the user authentication workflow to generate new OAuth 2.0 refresh tokens for Google Ads API will always be challenged with a second factor for authentication in addition to a username and password.
If you don’t have 2-step verification enabled, you will be prompted to add a 2-step verification method.
What action do I need to take?
You may be affected by this change, depending on the authentication workflow that your application uses.
What other platforms are affected by this change?
If you use Google Ads Editor, Google Ads Scripts, BigQuery Data Transfer Service or Data Studio to manage Google Ads, you will start getting challenged with a second factor for authentication in addition to a username and password. If you don’t have 2-step verification enabled, you will be prompted to add a 2-step verification method.
How can users check and enable MFA?
Users can check whether MFA is enabled for their account by opening the Security tab of their Google Account settings page. The 2-Step Verification setting is displayed in the How you sign in to Google section. If MFA isn’t enabled, follow the on-screen steps displayed in this section.
If you don't see the 2-Step Verification option for your account, your administrator might have disabled it. Contact your administrator for assistance.
Troubleshooting
Q: When I navigate to the Google Account settings page, I don’t see the 2-Step Verification option for my account.
A: If you don't see the 2-Step Verification option for your account, your administrator might have disabled it. Contact your administrator for assistance.
Q: I don’t have a 2-step verification option enabled for my account. When I attempt to sign in, I get an error that "Google couldn’t verify this account belongs to you." and I am prompted to Recover account instead of prompting me to add a 2-step verification.
A: In certain situations, Google needs additional verification before letting you add a second factor to your account. To fix the issue, navigate to the Security tab of your Google Account settings page. The 2-Step Verification setting is displayed in the How you sign in to Google section. If 2-Step Verification isn’t enabled, follow the on-screen steps displayed in this section. Wait for a few minutes and attempt signing into the Google Ads API application again.
For any questions or further discussion regarding this update, please connect with us on the "Google Advertising and Measurement Community" Discord server.
One year ago, on April 9th, 2025 Google announced the Agent2Agent(A2A) protocol. We saw the need for a "common language" that allows AI agents built on different frameworks to collaborate well across diverse systems. Then, on June 23, 2025 at the Open Source Summit North America in Denver, Mike Smith stood on stage to share a pivotal moment for the future of AI interoperability when Google officially donated the A2A protocol to the Linux Foundation, establishing it as a vendor-neutral, community-governed standard.
This move was driven by a core belief: for AI agents to truly transform how we work and live, they must be able to communicate across framework boundaries and organizational silos without being locked into a single provider's ecosystem. By placing A2A under the neutral stewardship of the Linux Foundation, we opened the doors for the entire industry to build, contribute, and innovate together.
The formation of the A2A Project was made possible through the support of our founding members, including Amazon Web Services, Cisco, Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP, and ServiceNow. Over the past twelve months, this coalition has grown, with over 100 technology companies now supporting the project.
The momentum since the donation has been remarkable. What began as a Google-led initiative has evolved into critical infrastructure for horizontal, peer-to-peer collaboration. Just one month ago, in March, the project reached a major milestone with the release of A2A Protocol v1.0, the first stable, fully production-ready version of the standard.
Key achievements from the community this year include:
This flourishing ecosystem of agent protocols helps standardize how agents communicate, interact with the world, and solve real-world problems. The A2Family includes AP2 (Agent Payment Protocol), A2UI (Agent to User Interface), and UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol), which are examples of new protocols created using A2A's open extensibility model for agent communication.
As we celebrate this first anniversary, we are more committed than ever to the "A2Family." The A2A protocol is designed to be complementary to existing standards like the Model Context Protocol (MCP); while MCP manages internal tool integration, A2A handles the vital external coordination between autonomous entities.
We want to thank the vibrant ecosystem of developers, contributors, and partners who have helped harden this protocol into a world-class standard over the last year.
We're celebrating the first anniversary of A2A all month long with "A2April". You can join the fun by sharing a photo of yourself in the community using the hashtag #A2April. To help you get festive, we've put together a commemorative party hat template with full assembly instructions.
Here's to many more years of innovation and open collaboration!
Thank you to the following contributors: Mike Smith, Alan Blount, Kassandra Dhillon, Daryl Ducharme, and April Kyle Nassi
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Android 17 has reached beta 4, the last scheduled beta of this release cycle, a critical milestone for app compatibility and platform stability. Whether you're fine-tuning your app's user experience, ensuring smooth edge-to-edge rendering, or leveraging the newest APIs, Beta 4 provides the near-final environment you need to be testing with.
If you develop an Android SDK, library, tool, or game engine, it's critical to prepare any necessary updates now to prevent your downstream app and game developers from being blocked by compatibility issues and allow them to target the latest SDK features. Please let your downstream developers know if updates are needed to fully support Android 17.
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Testing involves installing your production app or a test app making use of your library or engine using Google Play or other means onto a device or emulator running Android 17 Beta 4. Work through all your app's flows and look for functional or UI issues. Each release of Android contains platform changes that improve privacy, security, and overall user experience; review the app impacting behavior changes for apps running on and targeting Android 17 to focus your testing, including the following:
Android is introducing app memory limits based on the device's total RAM to create a more stable and deterministic environment for your applications and Android users. In Android 17, limits are set conservatively to establish system baselines, targeting extreme memory leaks and other outliers before they trigger system-wide instability resulting in UI stuttering, higher battery drain, and apps being killed. While we anticipate minimal impact on the vast majority of app sessions, we recommend the following memory best practices, including establishing a baseline for memory.
In the current implementation, getDescription in ApplicationExitInfo will contain the string "MemoryLimiter" if your app was impacted. You can also use trigger-based profiling with TRIGGER_TYPE_ANOMALY to get heap dumps that are collected when the memory limit is hit.
To help you find memory leaks, Android Studio Panda adds LeakCanary integration directly in the Android Studio Profiler as a dedicated task, contextualized within the IDE and fully integrated with your source code.
A lighter memory footprint translates directly to smoother performance, longer battery life, and a premium experience across all form factors. Let’s build a faster, more reliable future for the Android ecosystem together!
Android introduces an on-device anomaly detection service that monitors for resource-intensive behaviors and potential compatibility regressions. Integrated with ProfilingManager, this service allows your app to receive profiling artifacts triggered by specific system-detected events.
Use the TRIGGER_TYPE_ANOMALY trigger to detect system performance issues such as excessive binder calls and excessive memory usage. When an app breaches OS-defined memory limits, the anomaly trigger allows developers to receive app-specific heap dumps to help identify and fix memory issues. Additionally, for excessive binder spam, the anomaly trigger provides a stack sampling profile on binder transactions.
This API callback occurs prior to any system imposed enforcements. For example, it can help developers collect debug data before the app is terminated by the system due exceeding memory limits. To understand how to use the trigger check out our documentation on trigger based profiling.
val profilingManager = applicationContext.getSystemService(ProfilingManager::class.java)
val triggers = ArrayList<ProfilingTrigger>()
triggers.add(ProfilingTrigger.Builder(
ProfilingTrigger.TRIGGER_TYPE_ANOMALY))
val mainExecutor: Executor = Executors.newSingleThreadExecutor()
val resultCallback = Consumer<ProfilingResult> { profilingResult ->
if (profilingResult.errorCode != ProfilingResult.ERROR_NONE) {
// upload profile result to server for further analysis
setupProfileUploadWorker(profilingResult.resultFilePath)
}
}
profilingManager.registerForAllProfilingResults(mainExecutor, resultCallback)
profilingManager.addProfilingTriggers(triggers)
Android Keystore added support for the NIST-standardized ML-DSA (Module-Lattice-Based Digital Signature Algorithm). On supported devices, you can generate ML-DSA keys and use them to produce quantum-safe signatures, entirely in the device’s secure hardware. Android Keystore exposes the ML-DSA-65 and ML-DSA-87 algorithm variants through the standard Java Cryptographic Architecture APIs: KeyPairGenerator, KeyFactory, and Signature. For further details, see our developer documentation.
KeyPairGenerator generator = KeyPairGenerator.getInstance(
“ML-DSA-65”, "AndroidKeyStore");
generator.initialize(
new KeyGenParameterSpec.Builder(
“my-key-alias”,
KeyProperties.PURPOSE_SIGN | KeyProperties.PURPOSE_VERIFY)
.build());
KeyPair keyPair = generator.generateKeyPair();
You can enroll any supported Pixel device to get this and future Android Beta updates over-the-air. If you don’t have a Pixel device, you can use the 64-bit system images with the Android Emulator in Android Studio.
If you are currently in the Android Beta program, you will be offered an over-the-air update to Beta 4. Continue to report issues and submit feature requests on the feedback page. The earlier we get your feedback, the more we can include in our work on the final release.
For the best development experience with Android 17, we recommend that you use the latest preview of Android Studio (Panda). Once you’re set up, here are some of the things you should do:
We’ll update the preview/beta system images and SDK regularly throughout the Android 17 release cycle. Once you’ve installed a beta build, you’ll automatically get future updates over-the-air for all later previews and Betas. For complete information, visit the Android 17 developer site.
Your feedback remains our most valuable asset. Whether you’re an early adopter on the Canary channel or an app developer testing on Beta 4, consider joining our communities and filing feedback. We’re listening.
The Beta channel has been updated to 148.0.7778.40 for Windows, Mac and Linux.
A partial list of changes is available in the Git log. Interested in switching release channels? Find out how. If you find a new issue, please let us know by filing a bug. The community help forum is also a great place to reach out for help or learn about common issues.
Chrome Release Team
Google Chrome
As Android developers, you have many choices when it comes to the agents, tools, and LLMs you use for app development. Whether you are using Gemini in Android Studio, Gemini CLI, Antigravity, or third-party agents like Claude Code or Codex, our mission is to ensure that high-quality Android development is possible everywhere.
Today, we are introducing a new suite of Android tools and resources for agentic workflows — Android CLI with Android skills and the Android Knowledge Base. This collection of tools is designed to eliminate the guesswork of core Android development workflows when you direct an agent’s work outside of Android Studio, making your agents more efficient, effective, and capable of following the latest recommended patterns and best practices.
Whether you are just starting your development journey on Android, are a seasoned Android developer, or managing apps across mobile and web platforms, building your apps with the latest guidance, tools, and AI-assistance is easier than ever. No matter which environment you begin with these resources, you can always transition your development experience to Android Studio—where the state-of-the-art tools and agents for Android development are available to help your app experience truly shine.
Your agents perform best when they have a lightweight, programmatic interface to interact with the Android SDK and development environment. So, at the heart of this new workflow is a revitalized Android CLI. The new Android CLI serves as the primary interface for Android development from the terminal, featuring commands for environment setup, project creation, and device management—with more modern capabilities and easy updatability in mind.
The create command makes an Android app project in seconds.
In our internal experiments, Android CLI improved project and environment setup by reducing LLM token usage by more than 70%, and tasks were completed 3X faster than when agents attempted to navigate these tasks using only the standard toolsets.
Key capabilities available to you include:
android sdk install to download only the specific components needed, ensuring a lean development environment.android create command generates new projects from official templates, ensuring the recommended architecture and best practices are applied from the very first line of code.android emulator and deploy apps using android run, eliminating the guesswork involved in manual build and deploy cycles.android update to ensure that you have the latest capabilities available.
Android CLI can create a device, run your app on it, and make it easier for agents to navigate UI.
While Android CLI will empower your agentic development flows, it’s also been designed to streamline CI, maintenance, and any other scripted automation for the increasingly distributed nature of Android development. Download and try out the Android CLI today!
Traditional documentation can be descriptive, conceptual, and high-level. While perfect for learning, LLMs often require precise, actionable instructions to execute complex workflows without using outdated patterns and libraries.
To bridge this gap, we are launching the Android skills GitHub repository. Skills are modular, markdown-based (SKILL.md) instruction sets that provide a technical specification for a task and are designed to trigger automatically when your prompt matches the skill's metadata, saving you the hassle of manually attaching documentation to every prompt.
Android skills cover 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.
In our initial release, the repository includes skills like:
If you’re using Android CLI, you can browse and set up your agent workflow with our growing collection of skills using the android skills command. These skills can also live alongside any other skills you create, or third-party skills created by the Android developer community. Learn more about getting started with Android skills.
Install Android skills via the Android CLI to make your agent more effective and efficient.
The third component we are launching today is the Android Knowledge Base. Accessible through the android docs command and already available in the latest version of Android Studio, this specialized data source enables agents to search and fetch the latest authoritative developer guidelines to use as relevant context.
The Android Knowledge Base ensures agents have the latest context, guidance, and best practices for Android.
By accessing the frequently updated knowledge base, agents can ground their responses in the most recent information from Android developer docs, Firebase, Google Developers, and Kotlin docs. This ensures that even if an LLM's training cutoff is a year old, it can still provide guidance on the latest frameworks and patterns we recommend today.
In addition to empowering developers and agents to handle project setup and boilerplate code, we’ve also designed these new tools and resources to make it easier to transition to Android Studio. That means you can start a prototype quickly with an agent using Android CLI and then open the project in Android Studio to fine-tune your UI with visual tools for code editing, UI design, deep debugging, and advanced profiling that scale with the growing capabilities of your app.
And when it is time to build a high-quality app for large-scale publication across various device types, our agent in Android Studio is here to help, while leveraging the latest development best practices and libraries. Beyond the powerful Agent and Planning Modes for active development, we have introduced an AI-powered New Project flow, which provides an entry point to rapidly prototyping your next great idea for Android.
These built-in agents make it simple to extend your app ideas across phones, foldables, tablets, Wear OS, Android Auto, and Android TV. Equipped with full context of your project’s source code and a comprehensive suite of debugging, profiling, and emulation tools, you have an end-to-end, AI-accelerated toolkit at your disposal.
Android CLI is available in preview today, along with a growing set of Android skills and knowledge for agents. To get started, head over to d.android.com/tools/agents to download Android CLI.
Today’s upgrades for AI Mode in Chrome transform how you interact with the web
It’s an incredible time to be a developer in the advertising space. Innovation is moving at a breakneck pace, and we’re shifting from incremental API integrations to fundamental improvements in how technical users interact with our platforms. In the latest episode of Ads DevCast, I sat down with my colleague Matt Landers to discuss how AI is moving from "hype" to "utility," decreasing friction in development and delivering tangible business results.
One of the most exciting developments we’re seeing is the value of Advertising MCPs (Model Context Protocol) servers showing up. These open-standard tools allow your AI agents to interact directly with the Google Ads and Google Analytics APIs.
Historically, solving a problem like "why is my high-CTR ad not converting?" meant a lot of manual data joining between Ads and Analytics. By combining the Google Ads and Analytics MCPs, you can now perform this analysis in seconds using natural language. You can verify engagement rates, identify content mismatches on landing pages, and even suggest ROI improvements in the time it takes to brew a cup of coffee.
We’re also seeing AI make technical tasks more accessible. A great example is the recent update to our Sheets Report Builder add-on for Google Analytics 4. Previously, creating complex reports required manually adding dimensions, metrics, and filters in the UI. Now, with Gemini integrated directly into Sheets, you can simply ask, "What's my highest converting landing page?" and the tool automatically sets all the parameters in the UI, sends the API request, and imports the data for you.
For developers deep in the code, the Google Ads API Developer Assistant is a game-changer. Think of it as a senior pair programmer that has memorized the entire API schema and every possible error code. Whether you’re troubleshooting conversion uploads or finding hidden problems in your account, the assistant doesn’t just explain what’s wrong—it can generate, debug, and even run the fix directly in your environment.
Beyond AI-driven insights, we’re focused on improving the underlying health of your technical systems. The Data Manager API will soon feature integrated diagnostics in the UI, allowing you to track what went wrong with your integrations. Last but not least, for publishers, we’ve released a new migration skill for the AdMob SDK to help you transition between versions with the help of your coding agent.
The barrier to entry for building sophisticated, data-driven advertising solutions is dropping. By automating the busy work, you’re freed up to focus on high-impact projects that drive real business growth.
Watch the full episode: goo.gle/watchadsdevcast
Listen on the go: goo.gle/listenadsdevcast
Take our Episode 3 Survey: goo.gle/adc-survey-e3
Join our Discord Community: goo.gle/ads-and-measurement-discord
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Cory Liseno
Google’s Advertising and Measurement Developer Relations team
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