Google I/O 2026 produced the usual firehose of announcements on 19 May. Most of them will not change your roadmap. Three of them should. Here is the filter I applied: does this change what I build, what I have to fix, or what my client can sell? Everything that survived that test is below; everything that did not is at the bottom, briefly, so you know it exists.
Views are now in maintenance mode
This is the headline, and it was stated plainly: legacy View components and View-based libraries now receive critical bug fixes only. Compose is the standard. Google says more than 75% of new production Android apps already use Compose as their first UI layer, so this codifies reality rather than creating it. For a greenfield app the decision is made for you. For an established View codebase, nothing breaks tomorrow — but you should stop writing new screens in XML, and you now have a concrete argument for the migration budget you have been asking for.
AppFunctions: your app becomes callable by AI agents
AppFunctions is a platform API and Jetpack library that lets an app expose its capabilities so that AI agents can discover and execute them. It simplifies Model Context Protocol integration, effectively letting your app act as an MCP server. It is in private preview with Gemini integration and an Early Access Program. Treat this as the most strategically important announcement of the conference. For a decade, app discovery meant the Play Store. If assistants become the surface where users express intent — "book me a table", "log this expense" — then being callable is being discoverable. Apps that expose no functions are invisible to that surface.
Adaptive is no longer a nice-to-have
Google is targeting 580 million large-screen devices, announced a laptop form factor called Googlebook with a desktop emulator in Android Studio Canary, and made large-screen resizability mandatory for apps targeting Android 17. Jetpack Navigation 3 shipped for adaptive design across phones, foldables, tablets, cars and XR, and experimental Grid and FlexBox layouts landed in Compose. Read those together and the message is unambiguous: the portrait-locked phone app is a legacy artefact. If your app calls setRequestedOrientation or sets resizeableActivity to false, that code is now on a clock.
On-device intelligence: Gemini Nano 4 and the ADK
Google previewed Gemini Nano 4 for on-device tasks and released an Agent Development Kit for Android, including two communication protocols, AG-UI and A2UI, for building agentic experiences. The honest advice has not changed since last year: on-device models are excellent for classification, summarisation and extraction over data you should not send to a server, and still weak for open-ended generation. The ADK matters because it standardises the plumbing — if you have been hand-rolling agent loops, look at it before you write another retry wrapper.
Tooling: the AI-assisted build pipeline
The Android CLI is now stable, exposing programmatic tools designed for AI agents: semantic symbol resolution, file analysis and Compose preview rendering. Google AI Studio can now scaffold native Android apps from a prompt, producing Compose and Kotlin. A Migration Assistant in Android Studio converts iOS, React Native and web apps to native Android, mapping features and converting assets. And Android Bench is an LLM leaderboard for Android development tasks. Be sceptical of the generated-app demos and take the CLI seriously — a stable, scriptable interface to the toolchain is what makes agentic workflows reliable rather than a party trick.
Performance tooling worth a sprint
Three additions justify time on their own. The R8 Configuration Analyzer identifies binary bloat, which directly moves your install conversion rate. ProfilingManager streamlines memory leak detection, and LeakCanary is now integrated into Android Studio. The Android Performance Analyzer applies AI to trace analysis, which is exactly the kind of tedious pattern-matching a model should be doing. If you have never profiled your app, start with the configuration analyzer: shipping a smaller APK is the cheapest growth work available to most teams.
Everything else, briefly
Jetpack Glance unifies widgets across mobile, Wear OS and cars, with RemoteCompose for high-fidelity animation. Android XR reached Developer Preview 4 with core libraries moving to beta. Media3 gained an AI effects library exposing Magic Eraser and Studio Sound behind one interface, plus a scrubbing mode in ExoPlayer for smoother seeking. Play Shorts brings short-form video to Store discovery, and Gemini can now surface apps. Android for Cars unified the Auto and Automotive build story. Useful if you are in those verticals; safe to skip if you are not.
What to do on Monday
Three actions, in order. First, audit your manifest and code for orientation and resizability restrictions, because Android 17 will ignore them and your layout will be exposed. Second, stop writing new screens in XML and settle your Compose migration plan. Third, read the AppFunctions Early Access material and decide which three actions in your app an agent should be able to call — not because you must ship it this quarter, but because the answer tells you something about what your app is actually for.