Your laptop is the bottleneck

Compared to a phone, a laptop computer has more raw compute power. But much of that extra power is wasted when your IDE is old enough to drink, drive, and vote. Layers of backwards-compatibility software, instruction translation, and portability shims that exist only to keep old code running on new hardware take a toll on performance.

A modern IDE, built from scratch for the device it runs on, does not carry that weight. Strip out the obsolete layers, take advantage of native capabilities like the camera, and a fresh IDE on a phone can be faster than an old IDE on a laptop. Not in spite of the hardware, but because of the software. On August 15th, 2026, at the Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE) conference in New York City, we demonstrated two innovations in phone-native Android development.

Quick Build

Quick Build, designed by Bryan Chan and me, lets you make a small change to your code and run it within a second or two. As soon as you finish editing a file, Quick Build recompiles it and splices it into your running app, requiring no full build, no reinstall, and no permission prompts.

This is possible because an IDE running natively on the same device where the app runs is inherently faster than the old design, where an IDE on a laptop communicates over a cable to a phone for testing. That cable, and everything it represents, is gone.

Quick Build changes the way you program: the computer waits on you, as it should in 2026.

Sketch to UI

With IDEs designed in the 1990s, turning a hand-drawn UI sketch into Android XML is a manual process that can take too much time even for experienced programmers. Sketch to UI automates that process: draw your UI, take a picture with your phone, and Sketch to UI converts it into UI code in about a second. No waiting.

Get to Done! faster with an IDE built in this century, not the last one, running on the computer you already have.

Ship faster. We’ll see you at the next build. Let’s fly!