Android Studio will drop support for 32-bit systems following this year

Ben Schoon | Jun 11 2019 - 1:42 pm PT

Google has today announced that Android Studio will be dropping support for 32-bit PCs starting in 2020 as it pushes to the more efficient 64-bit processing that’s gone mainstream over the years.

As Google moves away from 32-bit processing, the company will end update support for the 32-bit version of Android Studio IDE 3.6 on December 31st, 2019. From that point, there will be one year of product support, with Google pulling all support and download links on December 31st, 2020. As for the Android Emulator, it will be deprecated on 32-bit systems with version 28.0.25 from June 30th, 2019. All support for that version will also end at the end of 2020.

Google explains that running Android Studio on 64-bit systems versus 32-bit enables a “better development experience” with IDE and the Android Emulator seeing more “efficient access to memory.”

The timing of this also 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.