Google is sunsetting Firebase Studio. The development environment that built and hosted full-stack AI apps from the browser is going away on March 22, 2027, and on that date every project that has not been migrated is permanently deleted with no recovery path (Firebase docs). If you have any live app or prototype sitting in a Firebase Studio workspace, this is your clock.

The catch is that the migration is not a drop-in continuation. There is no in-place upgrade. You have to export your code and re-home it into one of two successor tools, each built for a different workflow, and each requires you to redo part of your deployment setup by hand.

The dates that actually bind you

  • March 19, 2026 — sunset announced; migration tools started rolling out into existing workspaces.
  • June 22, 2026 — new workspace creation and new user signup disabled. Existing workspaces still work and can still be migrated.
  • March 22, 2027 — Firebase Studio shuts down. All remaining data is deleted and cannot be recovered.

So you have roughly seven months of guaranteed runway from today, but the realistic window is shorter than that. You will be competing for your own attention alongside whatever else is on the roadmap, and the export tooling is explicitly a work-in-progress (more on that below).

Pick your target: Antigravity or AI Studio

Google splits the migration into two paths based on how you actually used the environment:

  • Google Antigravity — the local, agent-first, multi-agent platform. Choose this if you worked in Code View, imported a repo, or want the Antigravity IDE and terminal with direct access to different models (Gemini, Claude, GPT-OSS).
  • Google AI Studio — the browser-based prototyping tool that has absorbed Cloud Firestore and Firebase Auth. Choose this if you used the App Prototyping agent and want the fastest prompt-to-app loop on any device.

You can start in AI Studio and move to Antigravity later via Code tab > Export > Export to Antigravity, so that first decision is reversible in one direction only.

The Antigravity path, command by command

This is the one with real tooling, and it is where the caveats live. Prerequisites: the Antigravity IDE, Node.js 20+, and Firebase CLI 15.10.0 or higher.

The automated route has you click Move now, zip the workspace, open it in Antigravity, then drop the prompt @fbs-to-agy-export into the agent pane. Google recommends selecting the Gemini Flash model for the conversion to save tokens on the high-volume file transformation.

If you do not want to spend agent tokens, the manual export is a single command:

npx firebase-tools@latest studio:export PATH

Replace PATH with the extracted folder (or the zip). The honest warning from the docs: studio:export is optimized for Next.js, Flutter, and Angular workspaces. If yours is anything else, the migration may not rewrite all the code artifacts for Antigravity. I would not trust that for an unusual stack without diffing the output carefully.

Once it runs locally, publishing is just telling the agent Publish my app and approving the firebase deploy it triggers.

The AI Studio path has a manual key step

Here is the thing the docs bury in a note that will bite you: when Firebase Studio published to App Hosting, it silently extracted your Gemini API key from the workspace .env and set it as an App Hosting environment variable. After migrating to AI Studio, you must set that environment variable yourself in the Firebase console, because the .env should not go into GitHub. If you skip it, your deployed app loses its model access. The safer move the docs suggest is to put the key in Secret Manager rather than leaving it readable by anyone with project access.

To keep your existing *.hosted.app URL you wire up GitHub sync in AI Studio and reconnect the repo (branch main, root /) to the App Hosting backend. If you do not care about the URL, the one-click Publish button lands you on Cloud Run at a fresh *.run.app domain, and any custom domain must be remapped — which can take up to 24 hours and may drop traffic.

What is not being migrated

Your agent chat history is not in the exported zip. It lives under /home/user/.idx/ai in the workspace and has to be zipped separately via File > Open Folder. Prototyper prompts are recoverable from the git log, but the agent conversation is not. And only the workspace owner can use the Move now button — collaborators have to duplicate the workspace or manually zip the code, then rebuild the Firebase project and environment variables under their own account.

What I would do this week

Inventory every workspace you or your team touched in Firebase Studio and tag them: production, prototype, or dead. Export the dead ones to a repo now so the export works while the tooling still does. For the production ones, run the manual studio:export against a scratch copy and diff before you touch the real deployment, re-set the Gemini key in the console, and rehearse a deploy against a staging URL. Do not wait for March 2027 — the export path is the part most likely to be flaky, and you want the slack to fix a broken artifact while the source still exists.

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