Android Studio now runs Gemma 4 locally on your machine

Google just shipped a Gemma 4-powered AI assistant into Android Studio. The model runs on-device — you don't send your code to the cloud for answers. It's a 30-billion parameter model that can read and write Kotlin, Java, and C++ code, plus logcat output and build errors. You get it with the latest stable channel of the IDE, no extra plugins.

The bigger picture: Google's been pushing its open-weight models everywhere — Gemini is the big one, but Gemma is the smaller, faster cousin designed for edge devices. Running it locally means less latency, less cost, and no vendor lock-in on your code. For anyone building Android apps, this is a free copilot that lives on your laptop instead of someone else's server. The trade-off is hardware: the 30B model needs a decent GPU to run smoothly. If your machine is older, you'll feel it. But if you've got the silicon, it's a meaningful upgrade over the old autocomplete.

Why this matters for us:
For the dev who's been paying for GitHub Copilot or Cursor, this is a free alternative that respects their code by keeping it on their own machine.