October 31, 2025

The Clerk team has been hard at work shipping new features to help you build secure applications faster. Here's a rundown of the highlights:

Android SDK General Availability

The Clerk Android SDK has reached general availability, bringing first-class native authentication to Android applications. Built from the ground up with Kotlin and following Android's latest development standards, this SDK delivers production-ready authentication with the idiomatic, modern patterns Android developers expect. After a successful beta period, the APIs are stable and ready for your production apps.

Modern Android stack: Built with Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, and Coroutines for idiomatic Android development
Organization support: Create and manage organizations natively within your Android application
Simple social sign-in: Integrate your favorite social providers in just a few lines of code

Current beta users should update to version 0.1.10 to access all GA features and improvements.

Explore the quickstart guide to get authentication running in your app in minutes.

M2M Tokens General Availability

M2M tokens are now generally available, bringing production-ready authentication to your backend services. After months of beta testing and refinement, the APIs are stable and ready to secure communication between microservices, background workers, and distributed systems. The new usage charts in the Dashboard let you track token creation and verification activity at a glance, giving you full visibility into your M2M traffic patterns before usage-based pricing goes live.

Stable production APIs: No breaking changes, ready for production workloads across your backend infrastructure
Usage-based pricing: $0.001 per token creation, $0.0001 per verification (opaque tokens), with 30 days notice before billing starts
JWT support coming: Local verification without network calls is next, making M2M authentication even faster

Check out the M2M tokens guide in our documentation, or explore the example repository to see two Express applications communicating securely in just a few lines of code.

Infrastructure enhancements

We've shipped several infrastructure improvements over the past few weeks to make Clerk faster and more reliable. These changes focus on database optimization and system resilience, reducing latency and improving performance across the board. The work is largely invisible to our customers, but the benefits show up in faster response times and better uptime for your applications.

The highlights include migrating our Cloud SQL database within Google's network to cut latency between compute and storage, isolating session API infrastructure to ensure session operations remain stable during incidents, and converting high-update database workloads to append-only models for better scalability. We've also optimized background job processing by directly queuing tasks that do not require transactional guarantees, reducing overall database load. Database tuning efforts have resulted in a 16% improvement in P95 query latency and 17% improvement in P99 latency.

Check out the detailed infrastructure changelog from October 9 and September 25 to see the full list of improvements and ongoing initiatives.

Other features, fixes, and improvements

Organization slugs are now disabled by default, with an auto-generated slug used instead.
Our drop-in components now display the most recent method used to authenticate to your application.
Clerk is now available as an authentication provider for Leap, an AI developer agent that helps you build applications faster with Clerk pre-configured on new projects.
SAML connections now support the ForceAuthn parameter, enforcing the re-authentication of accounts on multi-user devices.
The new organization growth chart provides detailed breakdowns of your organization activity over time.

Resources

How do I add authentication to a Next.js app? by Brian Morrison II
What is the best way to handle authentication in Next.js App Router? by Brian Morrison II
Build a Secure Real-Time Chat App in Minutes with React, Clerk, and Stream by Naman Srivastava
Devlog: Building GritPath OS - Day 1: Using Convex and Day 2: Using Clerk Auth by Xion Apex Academy
Unlocking the Power of MCP Servers by Hamed Bahram
Taking Clerk to production: Essential steps explained by Hamed Bahram