At Cloud Next 2025, we’re announcing product updates that transform Firebase into an end-to-end platform to accelerate the complete application lifecycle, including:

• Firebase Studio, a cloud-based agentic development environment to help you prototype, build, and manage full-stack AI apps - now in preview
• The new App Testing agent (part of App Distribution), a Gemini-powered agent that generates, manages, and executes test cases for you
• Expanded language support for Genkit, including Python (Alpha) and Go (Beta)
• New capabilities and integrations for Vertex AI in Firebase
• General availability of Data Connect, a backend-as-a-service powered by a Cloud SQL Postgres database
• General availability of App Hosting, the next generation of serverless web hosting with Google

Read on for more details!

Meet Firebase Studio

Firebase Studio is a new cloud-based, agentic development environment, created to help accelerate the entire lifecycle of shipping production-ready AI applications, from prototyping to management, all in one place.

It’s built for a wide array of developers: from those using AI to accelerate learning to more experienced developers who want to leverage a bespoke tech stack in the cloud. Firebase Studio fuses tools like Project IDX, Genkit and Gemini in Firebase into a unified, agentic experience, empowering you to move faster and build the next generation of innovative applications quickly - including backends, frontends, mobile apps, and more.

Starting today, you can generate functional Next.js prototypes from a variety of multimodal inputs, like natural language or images, and then publish to Firebase App Hosting with just a few clicks.

To learn more, check out the blog post and step-by-step solution to develop, publish, and monitor a full-stack web app with the App Prototyping agent. You can also head right to Firebase Studio to try it for yourself today!

Introducing the App Testing agent

Testing your app before launch is crucial, but manual testing can be expensive and time-consuming while automated testing frameworks can be flaky and difficult to maintain. To improve your testing experience, we’re launching a preview of the App Testing agent, a Gemini-powered test case generation, management, and execution agent that works directly within App Distribution. You define test goals in natural language, and the agent will use AI to understand and navigate your app, simulate user interactions, and provide detailed test results.

The App Testing agent is designed to help you:

• automate and expand your functional and UI testing efforts
• make testing accessible to a wider range of team members without requiring code
• adapt to changes in your app so you spend less time fixing broken tests
• run tests simultaneously against various physical and virtual devices

To learn more and to see the App Testing agent in action, check out the blog post!

Expanded language support for Genkit

We built Genkit–our open-source framework with built-in tooling and observability to help simplify developing intelligent features into your apps. Following the general availability launch of Genkit for Node.js in February, we’re expanding Genkit’s language support with Genkit for Python (Alpha) and Go (Beta).

These new SDKs bring Genkit’s powerful capabilities to even more developer ecosystems:

• Genkit for Python (Alpha) is ideal for experimentation and early development. The API may evolve rapidly as we incorporate your feedback, but all essential capabilities are available to start building today.
• Genkit for Go (Beta) has a richer feature set and increased reliability as it approaches production readiness.

Whether you’re using Node.js, Python, or Go, you can now leverage Genkit’s consistent tools and concepts to build sophisticated AI-powered features with robust primitives, integrated tooling, and an extensible plugin system that simplifies prototyping, building, and deploying AI workflows.

More integrations for Vertex AI in Firebase

Vertex AI in Firebase lets you integrate generative AI into your applications by providing a streamlined, serverless, and secure SDK. Building on the support for Imagen models (Imagen 3 and Imagen 3 fast) we recently announced, we’re sharing additional updates that provide you with more direct and effective tools to build compelling AI-driven features directly into your mobile and web apps.

You can now use the Live API for Gemini models to enable more conversational interactions in your apps. These APIs enable streaming audio or text input to the model and receiving streaming audio and text responses, letting you build real-time voice interactions. Firebase manages the underlying technical complexities of this two-way communication, freeing you to focus on crafting intuitive user experiences for your app.

We have also added support for React Native, so you can securely and directly incorporate Gemini APIs into your React Native applications, broadening the reach of AI-powered innovation to even more users and devices.

Lastly, to speed up your ideation and testing processes, you can now generate Firebase SDK code snippets within Vertex AI Studio. Now, while you’re experimenting or refining your prompts in Vertex AI Studio, you can instantly get the necessary setup and initialization code for your target platform, including Android, Swift, Web, and Flutter.

To learn more, check out the blog post!

Data Connect is now generally available!

Data Connect is a backend-as-a-service powered by a Cloud SQL Postgres database that’s high performance, scalable, and secure. Provide your app’s data model through a GraphQL-based schema, then define how to access and update data. Data Connect does the rest for you, creating secure endpoints and typesafe SDKs for you to use in your client code.

Data Connect is now generally available, including new features to help your app development:

• Gemini in Firebase to automatically generate schemas in the Firebase console
• Additional query and mutation features: aggregate fields and atomic data modifications
• Support for connecting to existing Cloud SQL databases
• Newly supported web frameworks: Angular and React
• Pricing updates

To learn more about each feature, check out the blog post! You can also try out new codelabs for Android and iOS.

App Hosting is now generally available!

Last year at Google I/O 2024, we launched the first public preview of App Hosting, our serverless web hosting service built for modern, full-stack web apps. You import your GitHub repo, and App Hosting handles the rest. By abstracting away the infrastructure, you can focus on building amazing web apps.

We’re excited to share that App Hosting is now generally available! During our journey here, we shipped major updates to App Hosting, including:

• Observability and logging, with the option to roll back to a previous version if you spot a regression
• A new zero-downtime domain migration flow
• A local emulator for rapid iteration
• More ways to customize your app, such as connecting to a VPC network, overriding build and start commands, and deploying to more regions
• Support for Nuxt and Astro apps (preview)

To learn more, check out the blog post!

What’s next?

We hope these launches and updates help you create, release, monitor, and optimize AI-powered apps and features even more rapidly, and we can’t wait to see what you build! If you can’t attend Cloud Next this year, we hope to catch you at a future Next and see you soon at Google I/O!

As always, you can stay up to date on the latest news and best practices on using all Firebase products by subscribing to our YouTube channel, following our blog, and following us on X and LinkedIn.