Android Studio Rabbit 2 opens the IDE to 40+ agents

Google released Android Studio Rabbit 2 as a stable build on October 28, 2026, at Android Dev Summit. It lets developers run more than 40 outside coding agents, including Anthropic's Claude Agent and OpenAI's Codex, inside the IDE. Google also shipped Android CLI as an official plugin for Claude Code and Codex, so those agents can build and test Android apps without opening Android Studio at all.

The shift matters because Google is no longer asking Android developers to use only its own Gemini assistant. The Android Developers Blog post, written by Adarsh Fernando, group product manager for Android developer tools, frames it as "any agent, any model."

How Bring Your Own Agent works

The feature is called Bring Your Own Agent, or BYOA. It is stable in Rabbit 2 and lives under Settings > Tools > AI > Agents. From there, a developer picks which agents to install.

It works through the Agent Client Protocol, or ACP. ACP is an open standard for how a coding agent talks to an editor. Any agent that speaks it can plug into Android Studio, and Google counts more than 40 that do. FoneArena lists Claude Agent, Codex and Google Antigravity among them.

Developer Gabriel Anhaia, writing on DEV Community, adds two practical details. You can install several agents and switch between them. Each one signs in with its own account and usage limits.

He also points to a data question. Outside agents fall under their own vendor's data terms, not Google's. Google's Gemini Enterprise terms on code retention and training are not stated to cover Claude Agent or Codex.

Android CLI as a plugin for Claude Code and Codex

The second half of the news happens outside the IDE. Android CLI is Google's command-line tool for Android work. Google says it runs "in any terminal, with any agent harness, and in your CI pipelines."

It now installs as an official plugin. For Claude Code, from a terminal:

claude plugin marketplace add android/android-cli-plugin
claude plugin install android-cli@android-cli-plugin

For Codex:

codex plugin marketplace add android/android-cli-plugin
codex plugin add android-cli@android-cli-plugin

An Android plugin for Google Antigravity sits in the Antigravity marketplace. Google stopped selling Gemini Code Assist on October 9 and is moving its AI coding help to Antigravity.

The plugin gives an agent commands for most of an Android workflow:

Command	What it does
android init	Installs the android-cli skill for the agent
android preview	Renders Compose Previews without an emulator or the IDE
android device remote	Provisions a remote test device
android profiler leakcanary	Runs the LeakCanary memory-leak tool
android skills list	Lists official Android skills
android docs search	Searches the Android Knowledge Base

Skills are packaged instructions an agent loads for a specific job. Google says it has published more than 30 of them across more than 20 areas. Examples include r8-analyzer, play-policy-insights and android-permissions-security.

What Google's speed figures show

Google gives two performance claims, both from its own internal testing.

Workflow	Google's result
UI tasks using android preview	77% faster, up to 3x fewer tokens
Memory-leak fixes with LeakCanary via Android CLI	Almost 2x faster, up to 25% fewer tokens

The blog post's chart for the leak test names Claude Opus 5.5 as the model. Google has not published the task set behind either figure, Anhaia notes. In a keynote demo, Claude Code ran a list of user journeys on separate devices at once, found memory leaks, fixed them and re-ran every journey. Google says the demo video is sped up.

What else shipped, and at what stage

Not everything announced is ready for production use. The blog post and FoneArena give these stages:

Feature	Stage
Bring Your Own Agent in Rabbit 2	Stable
Android XR Emulators	Stable
R8 Configuration Analyzer	Built into AGP 9.3
AppFunctions	Beta, per FoneArena
Fix with AI for memory leaks	Canary
Views to Compose Migration Assistant	Canary
Lightbuild	Early preview
Jetpack Keep	Alpha
Memory-leak command in Android CLI	Coming soon

Change Review, which reviews pending changes from an agent or from Git, also ships in Android Studio. Google gave it no stage label.

What this means for developers

• Pick an agent on purpose. If your team already pays for Claude Code or Codex, you can now use it in Android Studio rather than adding Gemini. Compare cost and output on one real feature before you standardize.
• Check the data terms first. Code sent to an outside agent follows that vendor's rules. Get security or legal sign-off before you point Claude Agent or Codex at a private repository.
• Try android preview in CI. Rendering Compose Previews without an emulator is useful even without an agent. It could speed up the UI checks your pipeline already runs.
• Gate remote devices. android device remote gives an agent real hardware. Anhaia argues those calls deserve approval prompts, and that is a sensible default.
• Treat the numbers as a starting point. The 77% and 3x figures come from an unpublished task set. Time your own UI tasks with and without the plugin.

The Canary features are the ones to watch next. Fix with AI and the Views to Compose assistant target two of the slowest chores in Android work, and neither has a stable date yet.