Because of the upgrade to using Gemini 2.5 Pro, I wanted to give Firebase Studio another go. I’m fairly happy that I managed to make a working concept, or at least saw a working concept, of what I wanted to build using Firebase Studio. Competitors like Lovable and such charge so much money just to give noob coders like me a feeling of actually coding a product, so it’s great that Firebase Studio can be a free alternative. However, Firebase Studio isn’t quite there yet. My first major issue is that the .env file seems to be published in production; this isn’t handled properly and should ideally be stored as a Google Secret or similar. Also, quite often, the preview server seems to go offline, meaning I’m totally unable to do anything because nothing loads. Then, I had some errors where the code went into an infinite loop and froze my tab, leaving me unable to fix it. I switched to the IDX version and managed to sort it out with Gemini using Flash 2.5. Now, for some reason, the chat history has been wiped clean, and Firebase Studio is interpreting my first message as me wanting to make a new app because it sends me the app blueprint. Clearly, Firebase Studio isn’t ready just yet. I’ll probably start this project fresh using cline and Flash 2.5, but I do hope someday Firebase Studio becomes a good free alternative to all the other rather overpriced coding alternatives out there.
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