Android CLI Adds Remote Pixel Access and 20+ AI Agent Skills

Google’s Android CLI command-line tooling now connects to real physical devices through Android Device Streaming, and the company says its Android skills repository has grown past 20 entries. The updates were announced on the Android Developers Blog on 2 October 2026 by Simona Milanovic, a Developer Relations Engineer at Google.

Android CLI is Google’s tool for command-line Android development, and the company says it supports any AI agent or tool. Paired with the android-cli skill, agents use it to create, build, test and manage Android projects, set up development environments, run emulators and execute test runs.

Real devices over a secure ADB connection

Testing on real hardware matters because some problems only appear on specific hardware or OS versions, but Google notes developers don’t always have the device they need on hand. Android Device Streaming is meant to close that gap by providing remote access to physical devices, and agents can now reach it through Android CLI.

According to Google, the agent talks to physical devices as if they were plugged in over USB, using a secure ADB over SSL connection. That covers spinning up devices, deploying builds, collecting logs and traces, and capturing screenshots headlessly, all from the terminal. To start, you link your project and instruct your agent to list available remote devices, then pick the one you want.

Skills ground agents in current Android guidance

Android skills are structured instruction files, called SKILL.md, that feed Google’s official guidance from developer.android.com into an agent’s context. Google says this avoids relying on a model’s training cutoff, supplying fresher API references, samples and architectural patterns instead.

The published list of tasks includes auditing Play policy compliance across manifests, runtime permissions, target SDK levels and privacy disclosures; implementing restore credentials with Jetpack Credential Manager; detecting and preventing implicit intent hijacking; diagnosing UI frame drops and querying trace data through natural language mapped to PerfettoSQL; migrating from Camera1/Camera2 to CameraX; moving Android TV apps from Leanback to Compose for TV; connecting Media3 sessions with Google Cast receivers; integrating the Play Engage SDK; configuring unit, Compose UI and screenshot testing; and auditing R8 configuration.

Google says the skills are environment-agnostic and work in Android Studio and Antigravity as well as with third-party agents such as Claude and Codex. Managing them runs through Android CLI: android skills list shows everything available, android skills add wear-compose-m3 --project= . installs one into a project root, and android skills update --all or android skills update wear-compose-m3 refreshes them.

Wear Compose Material 3 in the spotlight

Google highlighted the Wear Compose Material 3 skill, published as wear/wear-compose-m3, which targets Wear OS specifics such as round viewports, rotary input, ambient display mode, low power consumption, TransformingLazyColumn, and the AppScaffold and ScreenScaffold containers.

FotMob’s engineering team used the skill to modernize its Wear M3 app, migrating multiple lists to TransformingLazyColumn with ScreenScaffold content padding, ListHeader titles, SurfaceTransformation on cards and buttons, theme typography and Wear previews. Google says the changes compiled successfully and were verified on the emulator for scrolling, rotary, edge morphing and RTL, letting the team delete its legacy wrapper plus rotary and focus boilerplate. Google also says the skill caught mistakes the underlying model missed, including failing to forward ScreenScaffold’s contentPadding into the list and using hardcoded sp instead of theme typography.

“One skill, one afternoon, eight lists migrated and a pile of custom rotary code gone!” – Roy Solberg, Android Tech Lead at FotMob.

To get started, install Android CLI, run android init to configure your agent, then browse the skills and install them with android skills add. Documentation is available for both Android CLI and Android Device Streaming, alongside the Android CLI release notes.

Related reading

Sources

• Device Streaming and Android skills – available in Android CLI — Android Developers