Android is the frontier for agents and other lessons from Google I/O | Matthew McCullough

**Andrew** (0:05)
Today, we have a very special guest joining us, Matthew McCullough, the BP of Android Development Experiences at Google. And Matthew leads the engineering teams responsible for the foundational tools and platforms and architecture that millions of mobile developers, and honestly millions of just people across the world rely on every day to bring order to their lives, to get information when they're not at home, when they are at home, and everywhere in between. And today, we're going to dive into the massive evolution that's happening right now in the Android ecosystem. You know, it's Google IO and we're going to be getting an exclusive look at what is coming down the pipe, but also understanding the shifting engineering strategy from a leader at Google, how they're thinking about aligning to these new challenges, because as we all know, the device is the frontier. The more that we can bring models and technology and AI into the hands and the wristwatches and the ears of everyone around us, the easier and better that all of our ships are going to rise. So this is a really high stakes kind of environment to be building for. Matthew, we're so excited to dive into this chat. Welcome to the show.

**Matthew McCullough** (1:17)
Well, thank you very much, Andrew. And I'm so excited to, as they said, even in our prep for this, that anytime somebody says, would you like to talk about development, and specifically Android development, they don't usually get to finish their sentence before I've said yes. So I'm really passionate about this space, and I happen to also have a job in it, which is just kind of like a second part of the luck.

**Andrew** (1:38)
Yeah, that's just the bonus on top. I would be obsessed with the things I talk about even if I didn't have my job, but then getting paid to do it is just like, oh, this is amazing. So I'm glad all your planets are aligned. And I want to start by talking about the current landscape and how you're seeing things change in the development pipeline and what your team would really have had front of mind, top priority. What did you need to address and to make possible to bring to the stage of Google IO to make AI power development easier for Android devs?

**Matthew McCullough** (2:08)
It's a great question and it requires us to just do a very quick look back at history. I always like to point to how we got here and then where we're going as a contrast. I think three to four years ago, pick your line on this, if we said, hey, we need to be thinking about tools that don't just serve humans, you'd get the most quizzical, confused possible look from an Android Dev. And now, if you don't bring that into the conversation, you get a quizzical look like, do you even read Reddit, Hacker News or the like? And so this is a huge change in three or four years. Some of you might even argue that's like a year and a half, so even more compressed. So I think the top line thing that we should think about most, Andrew, is that anything that we're building this year, the thematic change that we're telling our Devs, is if you still want to do this in a hands-on UI button inside the IDE way, we have you.
If you are on your journey because companies are at different stages of this adoption and evolution, if you are working towards an agentic ecosystem, whether it's in a chat window to just get answers or whether it's in actual and short-term agentic flow to get some code recommendations or it's long-running tasks, we are building everything for a dual mode, both the humans as well as the agentic flows this year. So you can expect all the announcements to cover both of those two modalities.

**Andrew** (3:28)
So you're delivering it for anyone in the way that they want to work, because the idea is that your ecosystem is so big that you have to provide all of these entry points that are seamless and easy, but also intuitive and interchangeable across a huge ecosystem. Like that's a really big challenge to do that mental shift. You said it happened in a compressed timeline. I think that speaks to the rapid cycle that we're all in.
And so I'm curious, too, when you say, as somebody from a perspective at Google, that companies are in these different stages of adoption, that couldn't be more true. We cover that all the time here. We see people at all ends of that. What are, do you think, those bounding ends that you're really building for? What do you think are the most forward-thinking kinds of ways that people are using your technology right now? But then also, how are you making sure that the folks way back at the starting line are still getting started?