Gemma 4: The new standard for local agentic intelligence on Android

Posted by Matthew McCullough, VP of Product Management Android Development

Today, we are enhancing Android development with Gemma 4, our latest state-of-the-art open model designed with complex reasoning and autonomous tool-calling capabilities.

Our vision is to enable local agentic AI on Android across the entire software lifecycle, from development to production. Android supports a range of Gemma 4 models, from the most efficient ones running directly on-device in your apps to more powerful ones running on your development machine to help you build apps. We are bringing Gemma 4 to Android developers through two pillars:

• Local-first Agentic coding: Experience powerful, local AI code assistance with Gemma 4 in Android Studio in your development computer.
• On-device intelligence: Build intelligent experiences using the ML Kit GenAI Prompt API to run Gemma 4 directly on Android device hardware.

Coding with Gemma 4 in Android Studio

When building Android apps, Android Studio can use Gemma 4 to leverage its state-of-the-art reasoning power and native support for tool use, while keeping the model and inference contained entirely on your local machine.

Gemma 4 was trained on Android development and designed with Agent Mode in mind. This means that when you select Gemma 4 as your local model, you can leverage the full suite of Agent Mode capabilities for a variety of Android development use cases, including refactoring legacy code, building an entire app or new features, and applying fixes iteratively.

Learn more about the possibilities Gemma 4 brings to your app development flow and how to get started.

Prototyping with Gemma 4 on-device

Since the introduction of Gemini Nano as the foundation model on Android, it has become available on over 140 million devices. Gemma 4 is the base model for the next generation of Gemini Nano (Gemini Nano 4) that is optimized for performance and quality on Android devices. This model is up to 4x faster than the previous version and uses up to 60% less battery.

To make it as easy as possible to preview and prototype with Gemma 4 E2B and E4B models directly on AICore-supported devices, we’re launching the AICore Developer Preview. While we continue to expand the ML Kit GenAI Prompt API surface to unlock additional advanced capabilities of the model, you can already start exploring new use cases with Gemma 4 using the Prompt API.

Prepare your apps for the launch of the Gemini Nano 4 on the new flagship Android devices later this year by prototyping with Gemma 4 today. Read about the upcoming features and deep dive into AICore Developer Preview and its Gemma 4 support here.

Local agentic intelligence with Gemma 4

Running Gemma 4 locally, you can leverage its advanced reasoning and tool-calling capabilities in your entire workflow, from developing with the AI coding assistant in Android Studio to shipping intelligent features in your app with ML Kit GenAI Prompt API. This local-first approach, available under Gemma’s open Apache license, provides an alternative for developers to innovate in a privacy-centric and cost effective manner.  In a future release, we will update Android Bench to include Gemma 4 and other open models, providing the quantified data you need to navigate performance trade-offs and select the best model for your use case.

We can’t wait to see what you build!