24 Sep 2026
Android Developers Blog
Build your way: Use any AI agent of your choice in Android Studio
Posted by Matthew Warner, Product Manager, Android Developer Experience
AI-powered developer tools have become an essential multiplier for engineering productivity, with teams adopting specialized AI coding agents, custom enterprise harnesses, and autonomous tools. It's important for you to be able to build Android apps in the way that works best for you and your team, and agentic Android development is more open and flexible than ever before.
Last year, Android Studio opened up to any AI model. Today, we're taking the next step by introducing support for your choice of coding agents. With our new Bring Your Own Agent (BYOA) feature, you can seamlessly integrate your preferred coding agent into Android Studio-featuring Anthropic's Claude Agent, Open AI's Codex, and Google's Antigravity-and supercharge it with Android Studio's AI-optimized infrastructure and tool support.

Your agents, your AI plan
BYOA pairs your favorite agent with IDE-native intelligence, making it faster, more accurate, and more cost-effective. BYOA is available in the latest Android Studio Canary with benefits including:
- Codebase awareness and token efficiency: Android Studio provides the full project graph, build setup, and platform details directly into your agent using Agent Client Protocol (ACP) . The agent can then filter to relevant files or details for efficient token usage, lower latency, and sharper answers.
- Seamless workflow continuity: Transition smoothly between multiple conversational agent prompts and Android Studio's purpose-built tools, keeping your flow state intact as you effortlessly jump between tasks.
- Agent flexibility: Connect any ACP-compliant agent directly into Android Studio, and sign in with your plan. If one agent runs out of quota or isn't meeting your performance expectations, you can have another agent take over.
- Native tool injection: We wire up build diagnostics, UI tools like Jetpack Compose Previews, Android SDK tools, and Android emulator control so your agent has access and can test, diagnose, and execute directly in Android Studio.
Powerful, capable, and reliable coding agents
Agents can plan and execute complete technical workflows directly in your environment, unlocking powerful use cases:
- Execute in the environment: Read, write, and edit files, run shell commands, run tests, and search the web.
- Delegate to subagents: Break down complex projects by spawning specialized agents for subtasks like code review or testing.
- Stay in control: Granular permissions let the agent act on its own for routine work, and pause for your approval on riskier actions.
- Persist context and configuration: Maintain long-running sessions and automatically load project skills, slash commands, and memory.
Agents running in Android Studio also benefit from Android skills and the Android Knowledge Base, ensuring they have access to the latest Android best practices. And if you want to learn more about how agents impact model performance, read more about our latest updates to Android Bench.
Using Gemini with Google Antigravity
Many developers have been using Gemini directly in Android Studio through the built-in agent, and we will continue to offer this experience in Android Studio. However, for the best experience with Gemini, we recommend selecting the Google Antigravity agent for access to the latest Gemini models such as Gemini Flash 3.8, along with increased AI usage quota. You can also login to the Google Antigravity agent with your Google AI Pro or Ultra plan to take advantage of your benefits in Android Studio, or pay per token rates with a Gemini API key.
Selecting the Google Antigravity agent
If your organization is using Gemini Enterprise, you can continue to use the built-in agent or the Antigravity agent. In either case, your organization continues to benefit from the added security and privacy of Google Cloud.
Get started
BYOA support is rolling out in preview starting with the canary release of Android Studio Rabbit 2 featuring commonly used agents like Google Antigravity, Claude Agent, and Codex. Both enterprise and consumer AI plans are supported - subject to the agent provider. To connect an agent, follow these steps:
- Update Android Studio: Ensure you are running the latest from the canary release channel.
- Connect your agent(s): In the agent window, select one of the agents (Claude Agent, Codex, or Antigravity) and sign-in or provide an API key. Additional agents can be found in the registry Settings > Tools > AI > Agents
- Explore the docs: Check out our preview release note here.
Your feedback is essential as we continue to refine the AI experience in Android Studio. If you find a bug or issue, please file an issue. We can't wait to see what you build!
24 Sep 2026 3:59pm GMT
22 Sep 2026
Android Developers Blog
Land your apps on Googlebook with adaptive development

Posted by Fahd Imtiaz, Senior Product Manager, and Loryn Hairston, Product Marketing Manager, Android Developer
Googlebook introduces a new category of laptops built on a shared Android foundation. High-performance hardware from partners such as HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer, and Asus, combines mobile convenience with desktop power. Googlebook offers high-resolution OLED touchscreens, dedicated keyboards, and precision trackpads with all-day battery life and OS-level Gemini Intelligence. With Googlebook, users can transition fluidly from quick interactions on their phones to rich, immersive sessions on their laptop.
Bringing your app to Googlebook opens up valuable opportunities for you across the Android ecosystem. Google Play highlights optimized titles with dedicated badging, enhanced search, and featured spots across curated store homepages. Delivering this level of quality also prepares your app for the Apps Experience Program, where you can enroll to unlock a new program rate card designed to drive business growth. Even better, when users set up their new Googlebook using their Android phone, optimized apps are prominently highlighted for easy transfer, giving your app day-one presence on their new device.
Optimized for desktop badging and dedicated collections on Google Play.The best part? You don't need to build a separate app from the ground up to take advantage of this reach. Adaptive development is how modern Android apps naturally scale across large displays, new device postures, and emerging form factors. If your app already embraces adaptive layouts, it is primed for Googlebooks. By building on your existing foundation of adaptive UI, window size classes, and multi-input support, you can deliver an optimized experience.

Anchor your app in desktop fundamentals
On a laptop, your app operates within a desktop environment where user expectations shift toward higher information density, precision input, and active multitasking. Following desktop development and design guidance provides the principles needed to make the most of this experience. Instead of simply stretching mobile interfaces across a wide screen, an adaptive layout reorganizes content into functional groupings.
Adopt a multi-pane architecture to allow your UI to expand, reflow, or reveal richer detail as window boundaries change. With Navigation 3, you can implement adaptive scene strategies to coordinate multi-pane layouts directly from your back stack. Use ListDetailSceneStrategy and SupportingPaneSceneStrategy to enable side-by-side layouts when expanded window space is available. Scene decorators let you wrap screens with persistent desktop navigation rails. Pair these patterns with layout primitives like Grid and FlexBox, and soon alongside experimental MediaQuery and Styles APIs, to organize complex content and adjust visual styles dynamically for desktop displays.

In free-form desktop windowing, app windows can be resized dynamically at any time. Your layout decisions should respond directly to the available window space using window size classes rather than the physical display dimensions.
Desktop design also accounts for ergonomic viewing distances and precise pointer targets. Adjust your type scale for comfortable viewing across larger displays, set layout max widths to keep line lengths readable, and define explicit click targets to prevent misclicks. Explore complete design patterns in our design principles guide and discover real world inspiration in the desktop design gallery.
Deliver differentiated experiences for Googlebooks
Once your core layout is adaptive, you can enrich your app with differentiated features that take full advantage of a desktop environment. Everyday productivity in these setups relies on versatile input methods. Jetpack Compose natively supports physical keyboard navigation and pointer selection. Elevate your app's usability by integrating contextual cursors that provide visual feedback for text entry, pane resizing, and tool selection. Implement right click context menus and hover states; make your shortcuts discoverable through the Keyboard Shortcuts Helper.

On Googlebook, apps run in free-form windows where users can tackle multiple tasks simultaneously. Unlock side-by-side workflows by enabling multi-instance support, giving users the ability to launch independent windows for comparing content or managing multiple documents. Pair this with drag and drop to let users move text, images, and files fluidly between windows or even drop items onto an empty workspace to spin up a new task.
Multi-window multitasking with cross-window drag and drop.Go all in and customize your window frame. In desktop windowing, apps include a caption header bar that you can style with custom backgrounds, search bars, or tabs while respecting system window controls.
Beyond individual app windows, Continue On keeps experiences connected across phones, tablets, and Googlebooks with bidirectional handoff that lets users start a task on one screen and pick up seamlessly on another. Passing state through HandoffActivityData preserves context such as document position or active tabs, with optional web fallbacks to ensure smooth transitions.
Complement this by surfacing actionable information at a glance with customizable widgets. And, as you refine your app experience, benchmark against our comprehensive desktop app quality guidelines.
Developers are already bringing these patterns to life across the ecosystem. When bringing Notability to Googlebook, prior investments in tablets and foldables gave the team an immediate head start. Because their layout already relied on window size classes and adaptive scene strategies, their canvas and toolbars reflowed naturally during window resizing, while existing keyboard and trackpad support carried straight over."We had already been targeting first-class experiences for tablets and foldables," explains Ryan Shea, Android Engineering Manager at Notability. "So by the time Googlebook came along, scaling Notability up to a laptop-class experience was mostly turning a dial we had already built. That left us free to spend our time on the things that only make sense on a bigger screen or with the newer APIs, like Continue On, which hands a note off from your phone to the laptop, and optimizing the side-by-side app experience for studying."
Accelerate your workflow with dedicated tooling
Testing and optimizing your app for Googlebook fits naturally into your existing development workflow.
With the desktop emulator in Android Studio, you can run a virtual desktop environment directly on your workstation to test free-form window resizing, verify multi-instance interactions, and debug mouse, trackpad, and keyboard interactions. Download Android Studio Canary to set up your virtual device today.
Help speed up your layout modernization with AI-assisted development. The adaptive skill gives your AI agents the necessary context to help refactor mobile layouts into responsive Compose containers automatically. Install the skill directly through the Android CLI to streamline your implementation.
Realize new possibilities on Googlebook
The Googlebook family of laptops from ecosystem partners.The Googlebook lineup marks an exciting new chapter for the Android ecosystem, giving your apps a premium platform to deliver richer, more capable experiences. By building adaptively, a single codebase ensures your app looks and performs optimally across phones, foldables, tablets, and Googlebooks while unlocking elevated visibility and badging across Google Play. Explore documentation at our Googlebook developer hub, review the desktop design guide, and start building for Googlebook today!
22 Sep 2026 5:00pm GMT
21 Sep 2026
Android Developers Blog
Bring your Android game to the car screen today
Posted by Jan Kleinert, Developer Relations Engineer, Android for Cars
Today, the games category for Android Auto and cars powered by Android Automotive OS with Google built-in is officially graduating from beta to general availability. Our early access partners have already been bringing games to the parked-only experience for cars, and you can browse these in our latest collections of games for Android Auto and games for Android Automotive OS.
Bringing your game to cars lets you reach users in their vehicles during natural downtime, such as while waiting at a charging station or for a curbside order pickup. Today's milestone means that we're opening up access so developers can now publish games to the open testing and production tracks on Google Play. In this post, we'll cover how to adapt your existing Android game for the car screen, focusing on key technical requirements and publishing criteria.
Implement car support for your game
If you're already following best practices for building adaptive apps, bringing an existing Android game to cars primarily involves configuring your app manifest and ensuring your game respects the vehicle parked state.
Mark your app as a game
To distribute your app in the games category, you need to explicitly declare its category. Add the android:appCategory="game" attribute to the <application> element of your manifest file:
<application ...
android:appCategory="game">
...
</application>
Declare support for Android Auto
Games are supported on Android Auto on devices running Android 15 and higher. To declare that your game supports Android Auto, include this <category> element in the intent filter of an activity in your manifest file:
<activity ...
<intent-filter>
<action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN" />
...
<category android:name="android.intent.category.CAR_LAUNCHER" />
</intent-filter>
</activity>
Generally, the android.intent.category.CAR_LAUNCHER category element is placed in the same intent filter as the android.intent.category.LAUNCHER element, but it can be in another activity's intent filter if you prefer to launch a different activity.
Declare support for Android Automotive OS
To declare that your game supports Android Automotive OS, include the android.hardware.type.automotive <uses-feature> element in your manifest file.
<manifest ...
...
<uses-feature android:name="android.hardware.type.automotive"
android:required="false" />
...
</manifest>
The android:required value has different restrictions depending upon which track you choose to distribute your Android Automotive OS app. If you distribute your Android Automotive OS app on the mobile track, android:required must be set to "false". However, if you distribute on the Android Automotive OS dedicated track, you can set android:required to "true", "false", or leave it unset. Leaving the value unset has the same effect as setting android:required to "true", and means that your app is available only for distribution on Android Automotive OS devices.
Handle the parked state
Cars introduce a unique physical context with a driving state and a parked state. Certain types of apps, like games, are considered parked apps and aren't permitted to run while the vehicle is in motion to avoid driver distraction. By default, Android Auto and Android Automotive OS block activities from being used or launched when the vehicle is in motion or when user experience (UX) restrictions are active. To make sure your game complies with driver distraction guidelines, don't include the distractionOptimized metadata element in any activity in your manifest. You must also ensure that your game audio stops when the user starts driving and can't be unpaused while the vehicle is in motion.
Additionally, when the user relaunches the app from the home screen, your game must restore the app state as closely as possible to the previous state. Test your game for responsiveness and ensure it doesn't freeze or stutter during gameplay.
Declare game controller support
Car screens support touch input, but many users prefer playing with a connected gamepad. If your game supports controller input, declare the android.hardware.gamepad feature in your manifest to help boost the visibility of your app in the Google Play Store to users specifically seeking controller-compatible experiences.
<uses-feature android:name="android.hardware.gamepad" android:required="false"/>
Set the android:required attribute to false to indicate your app supports controllers, but the use of controllers is optional. Don't set the android:required attribute to true unless a controller is mandatory for your game.
Support common screen sizes and aspect ratios
Car displays come in various shapes and aspect ratios, including portrait and wide landscape screens. For a great user experience, make your game fully adaptive to different screen sizes so that it runs full screen without letterboxing or pillarboxing. For Android Auto, refer to the guidance for testing against canonical screen sizes and use bundled hardware profiles when testing with the emulator for Android Automotive OS.
Publish your game to cars
After you've implemented the necessary changes, you can opt in to Android Auto and Android Automotive OS form factors in the Google Play Console. Before submitting to production, test your game against the car app quality guidelines for games.
Use the Desktop Head Unit to test your app's Android Auto compatibility, and use the Android Automotive OS emulator to test the experience on Android Automotive OS. Your game will be reviewed against the car app quality guidelines for the games category before it is approved for open testing or production.
Get your games on the road
With the games category now generally available, it is the perfect time to optimize your titles for cars. To learn more about implementation details, review the documentation at Build games for cars.
21 Sep 2026 4:00pm GMT







