Android Gradle Plugin 9.2.0 landed in April 2026 as a focused quality release. No headline features, but meaningful improvements to build speed, lint APIs, and Kotlin 2.x compatibility that directly affect day-to-day development. Here's what changed and whether you should upgrade immediately.
Kotlin 2.x Compiler Compatibility
AGP 9.2.0 fully stabilises Kotlin 2.1.x compatibility. If you've been holding back on Kotlin 2.x because of AGP warnings, this is your green light to upgrade. The kapt → KSP migration is now enforced for new projects — kapt is officially in maintenance mode. Plan your annotation processor migrations accordingly.
Build Cache Improvements
Two notable cache improvements: (1) resource merging tasks are now properly cache-key-aware, reducing the "resource merge cache miss" on CI that plagued teams with large asset directories. (2) Compose compiler metrics are cached between builds, eliminating repeated recompilation of stable composables. Teams with large Compose codebases report 15–25% CI build time reductions.
New Lint APIs
AGP 9.2.0 exposes a new UastParser API that gives custom lint rules access to Kotlin-specific semantics (coroutine context, inline functions, reified generics). If you maintain custom lint rules for your team, update to use UastParser — the old PSI-based APIs are deprecated and produce fewer true positives on Kotlin-heavy codebases.
Variant API Changes
The Variant API (introduced in AGP 7.x) gets two new hooks: onVariantProperties lets you modify R8 rules per variant in afterEvaluate safely, and androidTest.sourceSetTree is now stable. If your build scripts use unstable Variant API components, check the AGP changelog — several APIs that were @Incubating are now stable or removed.
Should You Upgrade Now?
AGP 9.2.0 requires Gradle 8.11+. Check your current Gradle wrapper version and test the upgrade on a branch. Watch for: kapt tasks that need KSP replacements, custom Gradle plugins using internal AGP APIs, and any build scripts relying on the old ResourcesMerger API. Run ./gradlew :app:assembleDebug --profile before and after to verify improvement.