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

Posted by Adarsh Fernando, Group Product Manager and Esteban de la Canal, Senior Staff Software Engineer

16 April 2026

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.

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.

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.

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.

The third component we are launching today is the Android Knowledge Base. Accessible through the android docs command, this specialized data source enables agents to search and fetch the latest authoritative developer guidelines to use as relevant context.

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.

Android CLI is available in preview today, along with a growing set of Android skills and knowledge for agents.