In a nutshell: Google releases Agent Development Kit 0.1.0 for Kotlin and Android. The framework enables developers to run AI agents directly on mobile devices with local language models and flexibly combine them with cloud models – for better privacy, speed, and cost efficiency.
Google announces the first version of the Agent Development Kit (ADK) for Kotlin and a specialized library for Android. The framework allows developers to run AI agents directly on mobile devices with local language models such as Gemini Nano while flexibly leveraging cloud-based models.
The Agent Development Kit for Kotlin brings intelligent agent workflows to backend projects and Android devices. The new version follows recent 1.0.0 releases for Java and Go as well as the beta version for Python 2.0.
The focus is on edge computing: with Gemini Nano available on over 140 million Android devices, developers can now run AI models directly on mobile devices. This enables faster, more cost-effective, and more privacy-friendly applications. The ADK significantly simplifies the complex orchestration of agents between cloud and edge devices.
Key features include hybrid orchestration, where a cloud model serves as a central coordinator and delegates specific tasks to on-device agents. Sequential on-device agents enable multiple consecutive tasks. Through local queries, data from devices such as documents can be extracted without leaving the device. Agents can be equipped with specific tools and provided with instructions.
A practical example is a trip assistant that was presented during Google I/O. A cloud-based orchestrator interacts with users but delegates the verification of booking confirmations to an on-device agent. Various retrieval agents use Gemini Nano locally to extract data from stored documents, while a validation agent compares the results. This keeps private data offline while leveraging the reasoning capabilities of the cloud.
To get started, developers can add ADK to their Android project via the dependency `com.google.adk:google-adk-kotlin-core-android:0.1.0` in the build.gradle.kts file.