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.
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.
>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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
`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.
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?
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.
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[ 9.7 ms ] story [ 61.9 ms ] thread>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?
No such thing.
F you google. Me too. Why didn't we get a sane way to build android apps before you had to please chatbots?
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).
Doesn't Xcode allow you to plug in agents like VS Code does?
Is there any step by step process or guidance on it?
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.
`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!
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.
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.
Because the real bottleneck is really the velocity of development, right next to keeping the codebase small - right guys?
It is so annoying that each agent has its own ideas where it tries to get the docs, usually by blindly grepping.