Firebase Studio Review: An Enticing AI Coding Competitor — But Not Quite Ready Yet

Firebase Studio shows promise but ultimately a product in a beta phase.

Apr 26, 2025

When Google unveiled Firebase Studio, it felt like a glimpse into the future: an AI-powered development environment that promised to build entire apps from a simple prompt, all hosted entirely in the cloud. The vision is enticing — imagine skipping the headaches of configuring local development environments, instantly prototyping ideas, and leveraging the power of Gemini 2.5 and Google Cloud infrastructure under the hood. As a heavy Cursor user, I found the prospects of having all of this happening in Google Cloud to be both a godsend and a potential headache.

So how’d it go for me?

After spending time with Firebase Studio myself my conclusion is simple: the promise is real, but the product is still very much in its infancy. Below, I’ll share a combination of broader sentiment analysis and my own first-hand experiences working with the platform.

Overall Sentiment: Cautious Optimism

My experience so far paints a consistent picture: excitement about Firebase Studio’s potential, tempered by frustrations with its current limitations.

Strengths center around the rapid prototyping abilities, the seamless built-in code editor, and Firebase Studio’s dream of integrating database, authentication, and hosting into a single, AI-driven flow.
Weaknesses are significant, though — with unreliable AI generation, broken or incomplete Firebase integrations, poor handling of complex logic, and bugs in the development environment itself.

It’s clear that while Firebase Studio is an important move toward the future of AI-assisted coding, right now it’s better suited for experimentation rather than production-grade apps.

Strengths

1. Rapid Prototyping from Natural Language

The ability to turn a simple text description into a working app — complete with UI, backend setup, and live preview — is genuinely impressive. For simple CRUD apps or basic web tools, Firebase Studio can often generate something usable in a fraction of the time traditional setups would take.

2. Familiar, Integrated Development Environment

Firebase Studio’s editor, modeled on VS Code, feels natural for developers. If you’ve used VS Code or Cursor, you’ll feel right at home immediately. It combines code editing, live preview, GitHub integration, and AI prompting in one place. Everything runs in the browser, meaning no complicated local setups.

3. The Vision of End-to-End Integration

Though still incomplete, the idea of instantly hooking into Firestore, Firebase Auth, and Cloud Functions without needing heavy backend work is an incredibly powerful concept. Once stable, it could make building scalable apps dramatically easier.

4. Innovations in UX/UI Editing

Firebase Studio introduces playful, intuitive ways to tweak the app’s design — like sketching directly onto the preview to suggest changes. These features lower the barrier for quick UI iteration without deep technical adjustments.

Weaknesses

1. Not Production-Ready

Firebase Studio feels unmistakably like a beta product. Reviewers and users alike caution against using it for anything mission-critical. Bugs, limitations, and inconsistent behavior are common. Let’s not hammer this point too hard, Firebase itself is calling this a Preview mode for the app right now.

2. Unreliable AI Assistance

The default agent selected for Firebase appears to be Gemini 1.0. I had to scour the net to get some confirmation of that. After wrestling with this model to do some basic troubleshooting, I decided enough was enough - time to level up to one of the Gemini 2.5 flash preview versions. While Gemini 2.5 is powerful in theory, in practice the AI often produces code that needs heavy manual fixing. It can misunderstand requests, miss critical edge cases, or even break the app when trying to respond to follow-up prompts. 2.5 flash performed significantly better than the default model, but I was still missing Claude 3.7 that I was used to from Cursor. This might have been different if I forked over the money for a Gemini 2.5 Pro subscription, however.

3. Loss of Chat History and Context

One frustrating flaw I personally encountered was the loss of chat history. If the session resets — for example, if you close your laptop and reopen Firebase Studio — the entire conversation with the agent is wiped. This kills momentum, breaks the agent’s understanding of your project, and forces you to re-establish context manually. Competing products like Cursor handle this far more gracefully. It didn’t help that the example shared below illustrates that Gemini did not appreciate my attempts at humor:

4. Poor Handling of Debugging and Iterative Refinement

When I encountered coding errors during app generation, Firebase Studio’s AI often suggested the same fixes repeatedly, even after I pointed to the exact file and line where the issue was occurring. This lack of adaptive reasoning was frustrating — and shows that while the AI can assist basic workflows, it’s nowhere near ready to handle true software engineering problem-solving. One such frustrating example was when a table full of data was failing to render on the app. The console logs showed a websocket error and Gemini ran through a suggestion of restarting the app server 3 separate times! This AI literally gave me the IT “turn if off and on” meme solution repeatedly.

5. Incomplete Firebase Integrations

Ironically for a Firebase-branded tool, many Firebase features (Auth, Firestore) are either buggy or not fully integrated yet. If you need reliable backend functionality today, you’ll still end up manually configuring these services yourself.

Final Thoughts: A Platform to Watch — But Not Yet to Rely On

Firebase Studio is one of the more exciting experiments in AI development environments right now. Its ambition is clear: lower the barrier to building web apps by combining AI generation, cloud hosting, and backend services into a seamless experience.

But today, it's an experiment more than a dependable tool. Bugs, lack of robust AI reasoning, session instability, and missing integrations keep it firmly in the “interesting preview” stage rather than the "daily driver" category.

In my opinion, if you’re looking for a mature AI-assisted coding environment today, platforms like Cursor are a better bet. Cursor not only offers more stability and reliability, but it also lets you leverage any major AI model — including Gemini 2.5 Pro — with full chat history, deeper contextual memory, and stronger debugging support.

That said, Google is moving fast. If they can iterate quickly and address these core pain points, Firebase Studio could eventually be a serious competitor in the AI development space - and it likely won’t take long if Google is serious about investing in this space.

For now: play with it, be excited about the possibilities — but don’t bet your next big project on it just yet.