Android Gradle plugin 9.2.0 (April 2026): unified reports + R8 rule changes

Original post (source): Android Developers - “Android Gradle plugin 9.2.0 (April 2026) release notes” (Last updated April 24, 2026)

• https://developer.android.com/build/releases/agp-9-2-0-release-notes

The headline

AGP 9.2.0 is a “minor” release, but it touches two areas that routinely become launch risk:

• reporting you rely on to trust a build, and
• R8 rules you rely on to not break a build.

What’s new

1) Unified coverage + test reports (experimental)

AGP introduces tasks to generate HTML dashboards that consolidate:

• unit and instrumentation results,
• coverage across modules and build variants.

It is gated behind: android.experimental.reportAggregationSupport=true

2) R8 changes that can bite

Two changes worth flagging for teams with layered keep rules (libraries, consumer rules, legacy ProGuard configs):

• Stricter -keepattributes wildcard semantics: wildcards no longer match RuntimeInvisible* annotation attributes by default.
  • If you truly need them retained, you now have to name them explicitly.
• Negated names in member rules: you can now match member names with negation (example: keep everything that does not end in ForTesting).

Why this matters (in app store marketing terms)

“Build” sounds like engineering plumbing, but it directly impacts growth loops:

• Slower iteration: broken builds or flaky reporting means fewer experiments ship.
• More regressions: missing a test signal is how onboarding and paywalls regress silently.
• Hotfix friction: when R8 rules shift, teams often burn a day chasing a “why did release crash only in prod?” issue.

Tiny win

If you ship weekly, do this once:

• take your current release build,
• run your full test suite,
• then sanity-check one R8-heavy area (analytics, attribution, deep linking) after upgrading AGP.

Write down the first “surprise” and fix only that.

Read the original: https://developer.android.com/build/releases/agp-9-2-0-release-notes