Five things that changed in Android on 29 Oct.

1. 1

   1. Android Studio Rabbit 2 is stable and runs any coding agent

   You no longer have to choose between your preferred agent and the IDE's own tools, because the agent you already pay for now works inside Android Studio.

   Google released Android Studio Rabbit 2 to the stable channel at Android Dev Summit. Its main feature is Bring Your Own Agent. You can run Claude Agent, Codex, Junie, Google Antigravity or any of over 40 agents that speak the open Agent Client Protocol inside the IDE, with access to the emulator, builds and Logcat. It also adds a skills manager, agent-assisted LeakCanary fixes, AI change review and stable XR emulators.

   Android Developers Blog · OfficialRead the source ↗

2. 2

   2. Android CLI gets Compose previews, device streaming and agent plugins

   Agents working outside the IDE can finally see and test what they built, which cuts both cost and the number of broken screens they hand back.

   The details

   The second Dev Summit post covers tools. The Android command line tool can now render Jetpack Compose previews without an emulator, stream a real device from Google's lab, analyse heap dumps on your computer, and score an app bundle's R8 shrinking the way Play does. Official plugins for Claude Code and Codex install it in one command. Google says agents using terminal previews finished UI tasks 77 percent faster with far fewer tokens.

   Android Developers Blog · OfficialRead the source ↗

3. 3

   3. XREAL Aura is the first Android XR glasses, and the XR SDK is stable

   Android XR now has a consumer device and stable APIs on the same day, so adding a spatial layout to an existing app is a real option rather than a bet.

   The details

   XREAL announced Aura, the first wired glasses that run Android XR, Google's version of Android for headsets and glasses. It ships in November, runs existing Android apps, and launches with over 150 experiences made for XR. The same day, the core Jetpack XR libraries, SceneCore, ARCore for Jetpack XR and XR Runtime, reached version 1.0 stable, and Android Studio's XR emulators left preview.

   HN front page · CommunityRead the source ↗

4. 4

   4. Haze 2.0 brings glass effects to Compose Multiplatform

   If your designers want the glass look that iOS and Android are converging on, this is the one library that gives it to you across platforms with the native fast path when available.

   The details

   Chris Banes released Haze 2.0, the blur library for Jetpack Compose and Compose Multiplatform. It adds Glass, a frosted-glass look, a new effects API for combining effects, performance improvements, and experimental support for Android's native backdrop, the system blur added in recent Android versions. A companion post explains when an agent task needs a plan, using two Haze tasks as examples.

   Chris Banes · ExpertRead the source ↗

5. 5

   5. LiteRT in Play services gets faster GPU inference and smaller apps

   On-device models get faster and your APK gets smaller without shipping a new runtime yourself, which lowers the cost of adding local AI to an app.

   The details

   Google's developer blog describes an update to LiteRT, the on-device machine learning runtime, as delivered through Google Play services. It now runs models on the GPU through a new engine called ML Drift, about 1.4 times faster than before, and adds a CompiledModel API. Because the runtime ships with Play services, apps that switch stop bundling it and get smaller.

   Google Developers Blog · OfficialRead the source ↗

Everything collected for this issue: 396 items from 77 sources →

Written by Claude from public sources each morning and published without human edits. Spotted a mistake? Tell us.