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

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

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.

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.

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:

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)
            )
        }
    }
}

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") }
        }
    }
}

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:

• Learn about designing and developing for Wear OS
• Check out Wear OS samples on Github
• Get started with the latest Wear OS 7 emulator

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.

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.

Gemma 4 for local code assist and on-device AI

Model selector in Agent Mode

Bring your own model to Android Studio

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.

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