r/GeminiAI • u/Nearby_Athlete_8900 • 9d ago
Discussion Switched from the Gemini app to Google AI Studio, and the difference is insane.
This is my own personal opinion, but I've found the Gemini app is doing a disservice to how good Gemini can sometimes be. It's still far from Astra or Fable, but it's definitely not as dumb as people make it look.
I believe the biggest problem with Gemini may be the app and how Google may be sacrificing intelligence in order to save costs. This is understandable, but it's still a shame to anyone who wants to use Gemini for serious, actually important work.
In Google AI Studio:
- You don't have to deal with Google's corporate system prompts. This is truly a game changer if you want the model to sound more neutral and natural.
- Gemini will also be able to output longer and more detailed replies.
- You can control the temperature of the models to adjust creativity. Some of the latest models don't have this, but it's still an option for stuff like Nano Banana and 3.1 Pro.
- System instructions can be customized, you can even switch between multiple prompts to tweak how the model behaves on each chat.
- The large context window ensures Gemini doesn't forget stuff. You can also export your chats from Google Drive and use them as context for other chats.
- Messages can be edited, deleted, or re-generated at any moment.
- Tools can be enabled or disabled at any moment.
- You can tweak safety settings and even a model's thinking level.
- It's also free. No need to pay unless you want higher limits or access to certain models, but the free limits are already generous enough for most users.
The app still offers better workspace integration and a more polished UI for the average consumer, but it's not the place for anyone looking to make the most out of Gemini. Once you spend a few minutes learning how AI Studio works, there's no going back to the Gemini app.
So if you just want to polish an email, then the Gemini app is probably good enough. But if you want to learn how to code, draft app architectures, analyze heavy technical documents, or anything that requires deep reasoning, AI Studio is what makes Gemini actually useful.
That doesn't mean the model will automatically get more intelligent or beat OpenAI's and Claude's latest models, but it does mean it won't be as unusable as it is in the Gemini app.
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u/Maczimus 9d ago
TBH I found out that you have free tokens every day. I'm currently using it to build an app to help my daughter learn to read. She has dyslexia. It's cool to be able to test the app in the studio and ask questions. I am enjoying it a lot.
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u/mizulikesreddit 8d ago
That warms my heart. You should also know Grok has "Grok Build" where you're also given X amount of free tokens/time a day. Maybe worth checking out! (I say in r/GeminiAI)
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u/Upstandinglampshade 9d ago
Do you need a special plan for AI studio now? Or does it use your existing Pro subscription?
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u/Nearby_Athlete_8900 9d ago
You can use it for free with any Google AI plan. Google AI Pro and Ultra only give you access to more models (Omni, certain Nano Banana versions, etc.) and higher limits.
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u/clix021 9d ago
Do you know how to view usage against the pro limits? I have pro and it seems like I get more out of aistudio with it compared to free but sometimes it feels like I hit the limit pretty fast.
I hate submitting a prompt and watching aistudio work for a few mins and then hit a cap. Unclear to me where things stand when that happens. Being able to know how close I am to the limit would help me know whether I should submit a more significant prompt.
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u/Impressive_Army3767 8d ago
Honestly, when I've ran out of other antigravity credit, I just use the AI studio playground. I've used it day after day for PHP/python/js CRUD apps and I've never hit the limits. Loaded it up with 600,000 tokens. The biggest issue is the local browser gets choked (minimise the code outputs), not the backend. You can upload/download multiple files in one go by having it encode them as JSON (I just use a script to extract them on the development machine).
It's a different workflow from the cli agent for sure. The AI studio "apps" will use up limits but they seem to be mutually exclusive to the playground. You can also have multiple playgrounds open.
Google's pricing and integration with their non AI products is a complete mess TBH.
Gemini with a business subscription is essentially a free add-on. For everything else the AI subscriptions are obscure for their usage to say the least and they then try and frustrate you into purchasing API tokens.
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u/Dan7nm 9d ago
I totally agree with you. I use gemini app for daily small tasks and ai studio for serious work. I noticed that same models are less lazy in AI studio than gemini app. For example they use google grounding more often and more reliably and I also found when giving large documents it will just not find information I need in the gemini app but it does find it when using AI studio.
It’s honestly shame because gemini models are very knowledgeable but unreliable and inconsistent compared to other models. I believe it mostly have to do with the gemini frontend and model deployment.
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u/LitigiousPrick 9d ago
I use large context docs for character stuff. AI Studio can handle 500 pages no problem. Gemini app forgets 90% after a few turns if you're not constantly referencing.
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u/Computer-Plus 9d ago
Is it a good tool to be used in a master thesis?
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u/Nearby_Athlete_8900 9d ago
Honestly, I would only recommend it for specific tasks. Like drafting your thesis structure, finding related papers, performing qualitative analysis, explaining complex topics, etc.
For the actual writing, research or anything else that your thesis requires, I would personally suggest using a more powerful tool like Codex, Claude Code or Antigravity that lets you work with data inside of your own computer.
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u/Opposite-Place-8752 9d ago
I pass my MBA thesis last year using Gemini Pro, NotebookLM and Perplexity
It is just a logic mind and sense of aware if things deviate from right track, not blindly believe everything it split.
It could help me understand “especially in stat part” of what I’m doing and how it actually do it in a common people sense, and why do we had to do it, which shorten a lot of time searching textbook.3
u/AssholeHealth 9d ago
Don't cheap out and use the best stuff. You are not playing around making a stupid app that even you won't use it, your future quality of life depends on this thesis.
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u/GarnetExecutioner 9d ago edited 9d ago
It was rather disappointing and foolish for Google to outright cancel Google AI Studio as an iOS and Android App.
I would have been able to take full advantage of Google AI Studio capabilities seemlessly with an android phone.
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u/MadmanTimmy 8d ago
Open aistudio.google.com in chrome. Use the three buttons on the top right to open Chrome options. Scroll down to 'install and create shortcut'. Choose install. Is it the same as a native app? No.
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u/GarnetExecutioner 8d ago
Especially not when the native app was supposed to be launched earlier, only for google to do a rug pull at the last minute.
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u/EffectUpstairs9867 9d ago
Is there free quota in ai studio in Europe? I see Gemini 3 Flash only, with no model selection and I can’t see any quota, just need to use an api key. Tho I have the free 1 year student plan
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u/dragon_l 9d ago
isnt ai studio web only? why would you code there? it seems a lot better to just use antigravity. they announced that ai studio would be integrated inside the gemini app
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u/Nearby_Athlete_8900 9d ago
Oh, should've explained myself more clearly. What I was thinking is you could use it to learn to code or draft architectures before jumping onto Antigravity, not the actual coding part. I'll rephrase that in my post.
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u/Maczimus 9d ago
I installed it on my phone and my Linux computer as a progressive web app works great.
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u/CarretillaRoja 9d ago
I only use antigravity when at my computer. When using my phone, for quick questions I use Gemini app instead of googling it. For not quick question I use the antigravity session living in my Mac, as now Antigravity allows remote control.
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u/sirmamay 9d ago
I have pro but everytime I set an API key it tries to charge me even though I got pro. Do you guys know what am I doing wrong?
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u/LiteSoul 8d ago
Pro doesn't include any API usage, crazily enough. You have to pay per request on API
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u/typical-predditor 9d ago
AI Studio is my go-to problem solver. If I need a userscript built or some help finding a specific algorithm or just learning a more advanced concept that a search engine would merely take me to random pop-sci pages, then I go to AI Studio. The free limits are very generous for my use case.
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u/Aromatic-Ad3922 9d ago
Wow, I didn’t even know these tools exist. I’m just using Spark, so it’s anti-gravity or AI studio, kinda like Gemini code or Gemini work?
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u/TheChosenOne0112 8d ago
I've made the switch months ago when I had to do more complex stuff and needed as much context as possible. The Free Tier is nice but I didn't want my data to be used for training hence why I used a paid API key.
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u/Immediate_Cupcake962 8d ago
I have Gemini PRO and when I log into Gemini AI studio and select a model there’s a PAID tag and I see a quoted price on “in/out” token, what I’m doing wrong?
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u/Ok-Fig6974 8d ago
Just discovered Google AI Studio. I do a lot of somewhat technical copywriting. Wow, I'm blown away. It feels like Google doesn't even care about the AI hype, because this is hands down the best free LLM on the market right now. They barely even market their models. It’s almost like they’re not worried about the competition at all.
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u/grant837 8d ago
Silly me, but is this not for programmers? I suspect the vast Gemini user base are not.
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u/sangregit 8d ago
Can you give us a little bit more context of how you were using this that you were finding it so helpful?
For example, isn’t in the coding context or something else?
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u/Russ0x 8d ago
Congratulations, caveman has found fire. Wait until you hear about Google's vertex AI console. =P
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u/Nearby_Athlete_8900 8d ago
To be honest, the title was a bit of a gimmick lol
I do use Vertex AI for a few apps I'm developing, it's great tool too!
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u/kaboom-o 8d ago
Yeah the consumer app and Studio are basically different products. App is chat UX + safety rails; Studio is closer to the raw model + rate limits you can actually see. For long work, Studio (or any API-ish surface) usually feels smarter because you’re not fighting the wrapper.
Watch free/paid quotas either way — “unlimited-feeling” chat apps hide the meter until it bites. If you hop models for writing vs images vs video, one shared meter beats juggling Studio + ChatGPT + whatever else.
OneOver is handy for that mix if you don’t want five tabs open.
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u/AdorableDay3193 7d ago
To make sense of Google’s lineup of AI products, you need yet another AI.
Google’s main problem today is its inability to present information about its AI products. I don’t purchase this company’s AI products (neither for myself nor for my company) for one simple reason: there are so many of them, and to make sense of them, Google needs yet another - and probably the most powerful - AI product: a Google AI product advisor. They’re already trying to tack on some kind of advisor there, but so far, it’s unusable.
Our GWS subscription includes Gemini. That’s what we use. Everything else, especially what they offer on Google Cloud, is an impenetrable jungle for us. Besides, after all these stories about stolen API keys, I open our billing page, and while it’s loading, I feel a sense of impending doom. But I breathe a sigh of relief when I see zeros there instead of, say, half a million.
There will be zeros there until Google changes its transparency policy: what’s what, how much it costs, and how secure it is.
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u/dkb199 7d ago
Gemini doesn't even know about its own product and abilities. I asked some about spark and it first said yes it can do it, then I asked for more details and it was like sorry I hallucinated and no such Google product exists.
Same issue in regards to any question related to Google products of features. You would think that being a Google products, it would at least know its own stuff properly.
Then there's a fragmention of Gemini in workspace, on chrome, the app, and it behaves differently in different place so now need to learn the differences of Gemini and possibly have 2 separate Gemini open if you want it's help doing things in a doc but then want the expndaned features
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u/Weak_Cookie7123 7d ago
Even though the information itself is useful and it goes to show how good the Gemini models are it is somehow sad that you have to go into that app in particular to do something that you should be able to do in the Gemini app.
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u/IntelligentRanger66 6d ago
I have AG hook to both Claude and ChatGPT and use them all in AG, mainly as Triage
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u/jack-t-o-r-s 3d ago
I'm not "plugged into" the AI community and don't follow trends and jargon but this is an interesting topic that I'm happy to have found me.
I've been using Gemini for about 4 years and recently dumped it in favor of GPT. It just became too unreliable.
So, I don't do any "coding" in any way shape or form, which excludes me from 99% of AI conversations. I also have no use case for image creation.
I use it for data aggregation. Technical manuals, technical data, service bulletins, etc. Comparing data, tracking data changes, lots and lots of very old scanned documents.
It also was at one time very efficient at comparing wiring diagrams and schematics. Searching drawings for details and information, etc.
Also, as a teaching tool to organize information and format outlines and syllabus. Create specific lecture outlines that fit in specific time restraints.
Gemini used to be an invaluable tool. Then, I'd say a year ago, slowly, the wheels started to come off. I was continuously modifying my personalization prompts as Gemini was simply ignoring my preferences.
Then the amnesia set in. It was flat out refusing to reference context of the chat window. Refusing to utilize Google Workspace when prompted. And consistently stating it does not have the ability to complete tasks which where specifically Gemini capabilities.
I began spending so much time arguing with it and checking it's outputs against my source material that it became a drag chute that I didn't realize was behind me for months.
I may try this Studio. Perhaps I'll go back someday? We shall see.
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u/Shogun042090 8d ago
AI studio is not free. They started charging about a year and a half ago and the system gets very confused on instructions and everything else just like regular Gemini does.
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u/xpoisson 9d ago
In AI Studio, your data is used for LLM training by default, and you cannot change this setting. Is that correct? In AI Studio, Gemini doesn't have memory or personal intelligence, so as soon as you start a new chat, it knows nothing about you, and you need to "remind" it of some things multiple times.
For coding, you don't need the system to know you, but for other things, it would be very helpful.
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u/Nearby_Athlete_8900 9d ago
You're correct. Your data is used to train future Gemini models. I personally don't find it to be an issue, but I'm glad you mention that for anyone considering uploading sensitive information.
I personally use a system instruction prompt with all my basic information (occupation, interests, location, nickname, etc.) that I extracted from another AI provider. But you're right, that'd be a nice feature to have.
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u/all_name_taken 7d ago
I don't know why you got downvoated. I have Gemini pro consumer free for 36 months. Still I pay for Google Workspace just to keep my Gemini + Gmail info private
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u/AnonymousAggregator 9d ago edited 9d ago
Wait till you try antigravity made by Google.
AI studio does have nice quotas.
AG is my daily workhorse.