Android CLI: Build Android apps 3x faster using any agent

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2026/04/build-android-apps-3x-faster-using-any-agent.html

by ingve • 3 months ago

315 131 3 months ago

android-developers.googleblog.com

user2722• 3 months ago

Agents will allow human programmers to get what they've been begging for decades now: proper requirements and flexible, logical, tooling.

bayarearefugee• 3 months ago

Agents will allow human programmers to get what they've been begging for decades now: proper requirements and flexible, logical, tooling.

...and once this goal is finally reached the programmer will breathe a sigh of relief and then promptly be fired since now the machine can do the job as well as they could.

risyachka2• 3 months ago

The tooling in 2026 is so easy you can do almost anything without AI very very quickly.

oblio4• 3 months ago

What tooling?

rtpg2• 3 months ago

this has been my sort of big tent alignment with AI people. If I'm getting good CLI tooling that _actually works_ (or fixes to existing ones that have been busted forever) then I'm pretty happy.

Things that make systems more understandable to the LLMs ... usually make things more understandable for humans as well. Usually.

The biggest issue I've found is that vibed up tooling tends to be pretty bad at having the right kind of "sense" for what makes good CLI UX. So you still have awkward argument structures or naming. Better than nothing though

whattheheckheck• 3 months ago

Any textbooks or resources on getting better at naming things?

The Programmers Brain book was my go to

phyzix57613• 3 months ago

Its like major cities repairing their roads to incentivize autonomous vehicles to operate there. Win win for everyone.

jadbox• 3 months ago

I've been thinking the same thing lately. It's sorta frustrating that it required bots to force tech companies to make clean simple cli driven development workflows.

qingcharles• 3 months ago

It's wild that it took AI to get half the companies on the planet to actually add reasonably priced APIs to their products so I don't have to puppeteer every damn thing with a flakey harness.

fragmede2• 3 months ago

At the expense of no longer needing the human programmer...

Evidlo2• 3 months ago

Now please let us install the apps just as easily

stronglikedan• 3 months ago

downloading an APK and opening it is already about as easy as it gets. the only thing easier would be for someone else to do it for you

throwaway81523• 3 months ago

You're forgetting the installation ("sideloading", what everyone else calls installation) restrictions they are about to deploy. It will be a significant hassle to install anything without Google's approval. Many F-droid apps are showing warning notices about this upcoming change.

stavros4• 3 months ago

"This APK cannot be scanned and its safety cannot be verified. Learn more/go back" and "learn more" has a link that looks like nothing but is actually a button to actually install the app.

I can think of some easier things, for example popping up a dialog, pressing "install" and having my all actually be installed after that.

sunaookami• 3 months ago

Google collects usage data for the Android CLI, such as commands, sub-commands, and flags used. This data does not include custom parameters or identifiable information. This information helps improve the tool and is collected in accordance with Google's Privacy Policy.
https://policies.google.com/privacy
Disable Android CLI metrics collection by using the --no-metrics flag.

No thanks, is there no env variable for this? Doesn't Google have enough data already?

gowld• 3 months ago

Android CLI can write a tool that wraps android-cli and automatically passes the flag based on an env variable.

How would Google have enough data about a brand new product without collecting that data?

tredre3• 3 months ago

How would Google have enough data about a brand new product without collecting that data?

They wouldn't. But on the other hand, they probably have a large amount of in-house Android app developers on whom they can conduct such metrics collection. I wouldn't expect outsiders to have vastly different workflows, because when you get out of the happy path with Android all you get is pain.

panzi3• 3 months ago

`alias android-cli='android-cli --no-metrics'`

skeledrew2• 3 months ago

enough data

No such thing.

OutOfHere• 3 months ago

But can I publish an app without having to share my ID? I want an ecosystem that doesn't require it.

Flavius• 3 months ago

Absolutely not. That would be crazy.

nout• 3 months ago

Zapstore or Obtanium...

binkHN• 3 months ago

It's not just your ID; it's your address, phone number, and the list goes on.

iririririr• 3 months ago

Your agents perform best when they have a lightweight, programmatic interface to interact with the Android SDK and development environment.

F you google. Me too. Why didn't we get a sane way to build android apps before you had to please chatbots?

bitpush2• 3 months ago

Damned if you do. Damned if you dont.

stavros4• 3 months ago

Damned if you don't, damned if you do fifteen years later for an entirely different reason.

wiseowise5• 3 months ago

Google has been neglecting Android for years with subpar tooling and ridiculous development practices.

antirez• 3 months ago

Let's see if even mid/big companies with tons of resources, with AI and the right tooling will continue to write webview-apps or, even worse, use some kind of multi target wrapper.

whstl4• 3 months ago

I wish the same thing existed for Apple.

Everything I do for macOS/iOS is already without Xcode but it's a pain in the ass to keep up with changes, and there are things I haven't figured out yet (like AUv3).

netdevphoenix2• 3 months ago

Everything I do for macOS/iOS is already without Xcode

Doesn't Xcode allow you to plug in agents like VS Code does?

whstl4• 3 months ago

I don't know, I don't use/want to use Xcode.

What I'm interested is in the CLI tool for my own use, not necessarily for agents.

generalpf2• 3 months ago

It does.

agentifysh• 3 months ago

Flutter CLI is what we really need but this is a welcome addition.

bartekpacia• 3 months ago

It exists already. Wdym?

wiseowise5• 3 months ago

Flutter quality like tooling, I assume.

mridulmalpani• 3 months ago

How can I use this official android skill with Claude code?

Is there any step by step process or guidance on it?

cbhl• 3 months ago

Looks like the docs start here: https://developer.android.com/tools/agents/android-skills#us...

There's a link to a repo or you can use the CLI tool to init the skills

winrid3• 3 months ago

Catching up to Flutter.

firemelt• 3 months ago

flutter have this already?

winrid3• 3 months ago

I meant in terms of development speed with agents.

diego_sandoval• 3 months ago

AFAIK, Flutter has had a good, capable CLI since the beggining. You've never needed to install Android Studio to use Flutter.

wiseowise5• 3 months ago

Not even close. Flutter has been engineered from the ground up with excellent tooling, unlike Android’s mess of organically evolved crap held together by a duct tape.

aquariusDue2• 3 months ago

Yeah, I've been using Flutter since December last year and I'm really amazed how good the developer experience is. I kinda regret not picking it up sooner but from what I understand now's a great time too with the roadmap they've planned for this year (videos on YouTube explaining Flutter concepts and decoupling Material and Cupertino).

You can even make 2D games with Flutter with the help of Flame[0] but be wary that pixel art style games are a bit of a hassle due to some bugs in Flutter itself. Otherwise Flutter is a joy to use for its intended purpose: cross-platform apps.

[0] https://flame-engine.org/

winrid3• 3 months ago

I didn't say caught up did I? :)

hemc42• 3 months ago

Wow. Thanks for this update. It streamlined a lot of tasks.

Apart from this, next step will be to add suport for building android apps on the android phones itself. No desktop needed.Building on the laptop with agents and installing the build in the phone and testing doea not seem AI native. If everything can run on my android phone, development cycle will speed up.

xstas12• 3 months ago

you already could! just install Termux, npm install your favourite agent harness (pi for one has explicit Termux support, but its AGENTS.md works just fine with Claude Code for example - https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/blob/main/packages/codin...), and say you want an android app. It problem solves for a bit, then spits out an apk out to your Downloads folder.

hemc42• 3 months ago

Let me try this. Last year this was a dream. Can't belive we are so close to automate all of this.

My major issue last time was providing the feedback to the agent by running the apk on phone i.e, pass the debug log from the apk back to agent so it can iterate on it without me providing any input.

smalltorch• 3 months ago

You actually can right now on termux.

xstas12• 3 months ago

Also coding agents will happily compile android applications (of maximum complexity) via Github Actions where you can just pick them up with Obtainium. No PC needed

laxisOp• 3 months ago

What is obtainium.

pjmlp3• 3 months ago

I have programming apps for Python, Pascal, C#, Lisp, Java, GLSL shaders installed.

jadar• 3 months ago

This is great. We also need a tool to expose source jars to agents so they don’t need to compress. There’s a lot of Compose overloads that Claude just guesses at. I built something internally but it needs polish and Claude really struggled with the deep Gradle integration.

anabis6• 3 months ago

The install command shown for Windows is 404.

`curl -fsSL https://dl.google.com/android/cli/latest/windows_x86_64/inst... | bash`

The URL shown for individual OSs work, but the script errors for me.

`curl.exe -fsSL https://dl.google.com/android/cli/latest/windows_x86_64/inst... -o "%TEMP%\i.cmd" && "%TEMP%\i.cmd"`

I manually downloaded the exe, but it say socket error. vibe coding is going strong!

throwa356262• 3 months ago

Goggles Android tooling has been like this forever, nothing to do with AI.

embedding-shape• 3 months ago

Ah, ok, no worries then, here I thought they didn't care about engineering quality or tooling that works just recently, but turns out they never did! Thanks :)

anabis6• 3 months ago

I got a workaround a la GH Copilot:

<pre>

android skills list

Picked up JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS: -Djava.net.useSystemProxies=true

</pre>

csomar• 3 months ago

I honestly have no idea what is going on. Lots of broken things in what's supposed to be front products for Google and other "high name" brands. I don't get it: Where is everybody? Is there no one there? Are these companies really dead inside?

patates• 3 months ago

Same for Microsoft. Redirects to the void, 5-level-deep sign-in prompts, "contact your administrator" who doesn't exist...

Maybe it's a size thing.

fabiensanglard• 3 months ago

What error message did you get? Perhaps you ran it with PowerShell (this is a Cmd script)?

anabis6• 3 months ago

Tryed both. Copilot said it was wrongly utf16, but it was utf8 according to vscode.

rvillberg• 3 months ago

This is a good step forward, but keep in mind the claimed gains are about "project and environment setup", not the tasks you deal with on a daily basis in an existing project.

anabis6• 3 months ago

Taking screenshots, optionally with component borders highlighted, and operating the UI with element names like "button1" instead of tap 200,30 looks useful. If I could get it to work.

noahz-google• 3 months ago

hey! I'm the dude workin' on that + the `layout` command to try to make device interaction via CLI less painful. please do throw your gripes and complaints/suggestions at me; I'd like to make it work well/intuitively for folks.

DeathArrow• 3 months ago

Can we have a web development CLI with web development skills?

wiseowise5• 3 months ago

Android Studio on its deathbed. Just release VSCode plugin and kill it for good, it has been a buggy, slow mess for the last 3 years or so.

netdevphoenix2• 3 months ago

If you think Android Studio has been a bug in the last 3 years, you haven't used it back in the days of Android Studio Beta. It has come a long way.

belimawr• 3 months ago

Must be a web dev who adamantly uses VSCode for everything

Steltek• 3 months ago

I can't be the only one with a severe aversion to language/platform specific IDEs. "Oh no, you can't write Python in Vim, you need to get Pycharm!" "iOS apps? Don't try anything except XCode."

IDEs are (were? :-/) a very personal choice. Maybe I'm an AI but I would have loved a CLI-centric workflow. It would have kept options open.

hbn• 3 months ago

I haven't touched Android dev in the better part of a decade.

Is Android Studio notably worse than IntelliJ? Cause I use that every day for work and I love it.

izacus• 3 months ago

Android Studio is IntelliJ with tweaks.

Not sure what that dude is going on about, noone sane wants VSCode over that.

pjmlp3• 3 months ago

It has been like that since they dropped Eclipse.

And those of us that used NDK, had to wait until JetBrains came up with Clion, for Google to finally offer an alternative.

Apple, mostly in-house, Google, mostly out sourced to JetBrains.

miroljub• 3 months ago

I must say I'm quite disappointed.

I expected something useful for application development. All it offers is some wrapper around the basic Android setup command that LLMs are already good at. What, initial empty project creation now takes 5 minutes instead of 10? Big deal, who cares?

I had another hope awakening that at least skills might be useful. But except for a few migration recipes, there's nothing of value for day to day Android development.

Facit: I'll skip installing another Google app whose only purpose is more spying on me and keep developing Android apps the way I already do.

TLDR: Nothing to see here. Move on.

Natfan• 3 months ago

great! now let me know when your official app store transparently alerts users when an app they were using was sold to a third-party adtech surveillance company, please :)

hansmayer2• 3 months ago

3x faster

Because the real bottleneck is really the velocity of development, right next to keeping the codebase small - right guys?

overfeed• 3 months ago

Code-generation velocity, and the absolute number of lines churned are 2 metrics AI tools can irrefutably benchmaxx, so the vendors highlight them.

hansmayer2• 3 months ago

Oh absolutely - the old saying about only having a hammer and seeing each problem as a nail applies.

On the positive side, they've decided to come down from "superintelligence", "superchanging workflows" and other bullshit to the actual feature - 3x speed of text generation. Which is not quite the problem that needed to be solved in software engineering, but as you said yourself...

Ciantic• 3 months ago

`android docs` is the superpower we need for everything. NPM / pnpm should have similar `npm docs` that would allow humans and agents to search for type-signatures and JSDocs.

It is so annoying that each agent has its own ideas where it tries to get the docs, usually by blindly grepping.

1313ed01• 3 months ago

CLI in a product name now means LLM agent TUI specifically and not just, as I would have expected, any kind of Command Line Interface? And usually there is barely a CLI included at all and you are expected to mostly launch the full TUI with its own embedded readline-loop rather that use the CLI?

jezzamon• 3 months ago

This is a CLI, the example shows the Gemini TUI using it

sailingcode• 3 months ago

Efficiency claim: 70% less token usage, 3x faster task completion in internal testing. Even if that's marketing-inflated, the structured CLI commands replace a lot of trial-and-error. Gonna try it.

mixedCase• 3 months ago

Is there Live Edit support? I've literally left an agent running to automate the use of Android Studio out of my workflow when I just want to iterate on UI.

Android CLI: Build Android apps 3x faster using any agent

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