Google today announced that Android Studio will be dropping support for 32-bit PCs starting in 2020 as it is pushing towards more efficient 64-bit processing that has gone mainstream over the years.
“We will only support 64-bit operating systems going forward,” Google’s Sam Lin announced. “Using Android Studio with a 64-bit operating system enables efficient access to memory for both the IDE and the Android Emulator, and overall leads to a better development experience. While this change will not affect most Android Studio users, this change does have an impact if you use 32-bit versions of Microsoft Windows.”
Android Studio IDE 3.6 will be the last version to be working on 32-bit systems, however, Google will provide product support until December 31, 2020. After that, the official downloads will no longer be available, and you’re on your own without any further support from Google. Android Emulator 28.0.25 will be the last 32-bit version, and support for that also ends on the same day.
The timing of this lines up with Google’s requirement for all Play Store apps to have 64-bit versions available. That requirement kicks in during August of this year.
To this end, we are sharpening our product focus and we will only support 64-bit operating systems going forward. Using Android Studio with an 64-bit operating systems enables efficient access to memory for both the IDE and the Android Emulator, and overall leads to a better development experience. While this change will not affect most Android Studio users, this change does have an impact if you use 32-bit versions of Microsoft Windows. To aid in this transition for those developers using 32-bit versions of Microsoft Windows, we want to give you details on the upcoming depreciation timeline plus steps to take to be ready for this upcoming change.
To minimize the impact of this change towards exclusively supporting 64-bit operating systems, we will first deprecate the 32-bit version. During the depreciation phase, both Android Studio and the Android Emulator will continue to work but the products will not receive new feature updates.
