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# Chatting with a Googler @RodyDavis ! #google #flutter #firebase #developers #ai #vibecoding

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## Description

As GDG organizers, ​⁠​⁠@GoogleDevelopers and ​⁠​⁠@Google communities organised a GDG EMEA summit 2025. During this time, ​⁠​⁠@shrinishdonde343 had the pleasure to interview ​⁠​⁠@RodyDavis, a DevRel for Firebase Studio at Google. The talk focused on new AI models in Gemini such as Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 2.5 Flash etc. It also highlighted some trendy topics such as vibe coding and prompting and focused on how to best use tools such as Firebase studio to build exciting Apps.

Rody also walks us through how easy it is getting as the time progresses to build an app using ​⁠​⁠@Firebase studio and ​⁠​⁠@flutterdev . Stay tuned until the end to hear his views about where the future of AI and app and web technologies will be in the next few years. Also do follow ​⁠​⁠@gdgberlin.

Learn more about Google for Developers ​⁠​⁠@GoogleDevelopers here: https://goo.gle/40yMI2w

Special thanks to ​⁠​⁠@alicjaheisig-chiarello1986  for helping us during the process and to the crew members for their wonderful support.

## Transcript

**0:01** · \[Music\] Okay. So, hi everyone and I'm Shinish.

**0:13** · I'm a GDG organizer here in Berlin and I'm really thrilled to be here at the GDG summit in Berlin in 2025 with our special guest Roodi. Uh Rodi is a developer advocate, Flutter expert and a creative technologist at Google.

**0:30** · uh something about GDG Berlin uh it is a group of around thousand plus members and we organize tech talks, workshops uh and related to latest technology trends and currently we are running a build with AI campaign and that is the reason we have AI as our topic today. So yeah, thank you so much for taking out the time and it's great to be here with you.

**0:56** · Awesome. Yeah, of course.

**0:58** · So yeah, let us start right away. So I would like to like kick things off with asking is it your first time in IO connect in Berlin and how do you feel today?

**1:08** · Yeah, this is my first time in Berlin.

**1:10** · I've been in Munich a couple times and so I'm really excited about uh the event here. I have heard great things and uh the last couple years people seem to really enjoy it.

**1:21** · Great. Great. Yeah. And um yeah, so how was your journey into tech? Like I would like to ask you because you are a Google developer, a developer advocate. So did you have interest in flutter right from the beginning or could you just tell our audience a bit about how your journey was and how you got into this domain a bit?

**1:42** · Yeah, of course. So uh I grew up in a really small town and uh I was really excited about science um but I didn't know any developers. So for me, I came to it through hacking on everything, taking apart everything. Um, I was a musician and so I learned how to, you know, create um, music and things like that that involved a lot of like technical expertise, which led me to audio engineering. Uh, I was an audio engineer for a while and then got into video production.

**2:14** · Uh, then into system administration. And it was after college when I found out about app development, not just uh programming but like you know building for iOS and Android. And I realized it was a creative field. So I was able to leverage everything that I did in music and audio and started creating music apps and things that were really fun to build.

**2:39** · And so having started on Swift as my first language and iOS and then later Android, I was a solo developer having to build multiple apps. And so Flutter was one of the first crossplatform frameworks that I was able to use to to build apps really quickly. Um I uh worked in the mortgage industry. So I built mobile apps for uh loan officers and realators and then later worked at uh graphics programming and then um Google.

**3:08** · Thanks a lot. Yeah, that that sounds very exciting and I'm super happy to hear about your journey. Um, so would you mind telling us currently like if you have any side project or what is the thing that excites you the most in the Flutter community with respect to your development or uh with respect to your project or something like that?

**3:29** · Yeah, totally. So, um I really have enjoyed building with Dart. You know, it's a language that um is pretty extensible. You can compile to Wom machine code JavaScript and uh I feel like I've uh enjoyed trying to do a bunch of weird things with it including getting web components working or working with uh JavaScript interop uh in different languages like see it with FFI.

**3:53** · Um, but probably the thing I've enjoyed uh most in the last couple years is I ported signals uh from Pact uh into uh Dart so I could use it with Flutter and it's been uh really fun to kind of bring some of the best of the JavaScript ecosystem into Flutter.

**4:11** · That's that's great. Yeah. Uh I mean currently also the ecosystem is moving a bit towards AI. there is this AI buzzword everywhere and that's why with respect to this topic I would also like to deep dive a bit into the AI domain.

**4:27** · So do you know which uh kind of models are used usually in Firebase Studio with respect to AI and and why have they selected these models?

**4:38** · Yeah. Um so uh Firebase Studio uses a variety of models including Gemini 2.5 Pro for the um app prototyper and by default Gemini 2.5 flash for uh the Gemini inside of Firebase. um those models are extremely capable and fast and by you know having a full Google stack you know working with the Google teams uh for Gemini also firebase we're

**5:07** · able to like really have a cohesive picture of like how we want to build the end toend experience you know we have the telemetry to see how the model's performing and how we can give that feedback and see ways that we can improve it of course there's prompting um but then also seeing how developers use it, right? Cuz uh you may build the perfect prompts and the perfect evals and then lots of people come in and use it a completely different way than you expected.

**5:32** · And so uh it's been interesting to see how people have come to it and have been excited about, you know, bringing their own ideas to life through this natural language prompting. Um and then also inside of our regular chat, you know, we give you the ability to pick a custom model or even a fine-tuned one with a custom ID. Mhm.

**5:54** · And so it's been interesting to see um people take advantage of that too. Uh we give you access to like the preview models if you want to like try something that's uh kind of bleeding edge and I think uh it's just been really cool to to experiment with that cuz every model has its own kind of unique quirks and stuff like that. Um but it's it's always a trade-off between speed and performance.

**6:17** · And I think uh the if you come to Firebase Studio, you might be interested to see how fast you can build because we uh allow Gemini to read and write files and run terminal commands.

**6:30** · We have like a full context aware of your codebase. So it makes trying out these new features a lot easier.

**6:36** · Yeah. Uh that's an interesting point that you said because even the student community is very much into flutter and the ecosystem and I think for them it's very important that they like get to try the product a bit and um wipe coding is also like one of the like trendy topics nowadays because even the people who are not so much into flutter development are

**6:59** · using these wipe coding platforms and could you just tell us how wipe coding uh how can one use wipe coding putting into Firebase Studio or how are they related to each other?

**7:10** · Yeah. Um I think uh it's been an interesting thing to watch where people come in with a bunch of different ideas um on how they're going to use AI to build um on an ex extreme. You've seen people build SAS companies that are completely through natural language and trying to to build quickly in the open and and really fast.

**7:30** · Um where I've seen um particularly our vibe coding platform work really well is where you're using our templates uh for existing stacks like Flutter or React Native or even like we even have like .NET Laravel things like that.

**7:47** · Um, but then you can use uh Firebase Studio uh prompting with our app prototyping agent to build these secondary apps, you know, so things like your marketing page or uh implement new features or just try to get that first draft out there because it is so much easier to get something working and to see even if you're on the right path before you like kind of invest and start building.

**8:12** · So, um, one of the things that we've done to make it really easy for developers is we're helping you build agent apps. Um, and so what I mean by that is like, uh, inside of the app prototyping agent, if you ask for a feature like an AI feature, it'll actually wire up the image generation or the multimodal input both to and from the backend. We use Genkit. Um, and so it makes building those types of apps a lot easier.

**8:40** · So you can say like I want to have an app that gives me an inspirational quote and generate an image based on that quote and it can completely wire that up for you.

**8:49** · Yeah, that's that sounds amazing and I think as the as time progresses I think there will be more and more interest and with the documentations and uh a lot of resources I think it'll be more easier for people who are also not in this domain to use it more and to develop more apps I feel.

**9:08** · Yeah, totally. So yeah and then like let's shift the focus from uh AI domain to bit of general like developer ecosystem. So as a GDG summit we have a lot of developer advocates here who are um kind of uh you know showcasing different products and with respect to that what do you think uh like why do you think Flutter has such a passionate community of users and why has it taken off uh so much in the past few years?

**9:38** · Yeah, I think um one of the things that's led to that is, you know, first of all, Flutter just has an amazing team and group of people that are leading it up. Uh the community is really welcoming and trying to encourage people to come in with little to no experience or completely with a huge background in native experience.

**9:59** · Um, I think where Flutter really shines is, uh, as a plug-in author, you can get something working on the various platforms and then the next person that comes in, all they have to do is write Dart. They don't have to know how is this going to work on desktop or web or mobile. They just start building with these abstract APIs. And so I think it really makes the the toil of development a lot easier to where you don't have to think about how will this render on the different platforms, how will this function work on different platforms.

**10:31** · You just start thinking in features and you say like okay well I need to pick a file or I need to render a button, right? And so both of those abstract things work together to build like this really portable uh huge amount of code sharing uh crossplatform framework. And so I think even in regards to AI, Flutter has made it um really easy to build adapters and models. And so now you can build a chat interface or you can build an agentive uh application that you write once and you can run on all the platforms.

**11:00** · And um even uh a recent uh development is notebook LM actually used uh Flutter for both their iOS and Android app as well.

**11:11** · Oh okay. I didn't know that. Yeah, I have used notebook LM for quite a different things. uh even translating a book into a podcast.

**11:20** · So that was quite exciting for me and I I didn't know about this. Okay.

**11:25** · Um yeah. So to uh like think a bit about the future of AI and the future of the Flutter ecosystem, where do you think uh this uh like AI with Flutter will be in the next few years? And um where do you see it going? like do you envision um like managers or AI taking the role of managers in in the Flutter ecosystem or even in general in AI?

**11:51** · So a bit about the future and what do you think the vision of uh Gemini with uh Flutter uh studio is?

**12:02** · Yeah. So, um I think that there is a lot of uh I feel like we're just now reaching the there's a lot left on the table. You know, there's a lot of potential still left to do. Um so, in particular, Flutter uh is really well positioned because when you want to build with dynamic UI or um interfaces that need to adapt to every platform, need to adapt to any type of input, all these things are really hard to do already.

**12:31** · And so if Flutter takes that toil out and so you could say I want near native performance on all of these um application targets then that's a win. Um also Flutter has great support for like shaders and and other types of compute paradigms. So it makes building your custom renderer a lot easier.

**12:49** · And so like we could see the role of like building agents or even portable run times, you know, if if you wanted to embed something into robotics because Flutter has its own renderer, you could literally port it just like you can on a Raspberry Pi.

**13:06** · Um, and in Firebase Studio, you know, we want to make working with Flutter really great. And so I think that the world of working with Flutter is like, you know, trying to unlock the types of applications that people have been wanting to build. I feel like we've seen a lot of especially for experienced developers a lot of explosive uh growth and learning you know especially when it comes to notebook LM and Gemini deep research and things like that.

**13:32** · Yeah, definitely. I think yeah that is the like the way future and uh yeah that brings us to the concluding remarks for this uh podcast and I would like to thank you a lot for taking out the time to uh do this interview and um it was

**13:50** · very nice to chat with you regarding this and um yeah I hope that you also enjoyed equally and for our viewers um would you like to tell us about like where to connect with you and where can they follow your work or something like that and how can they keep in touch with the with the developer ecosystem?

**14:10** · Yeah, of course. Uh so, uh definitely check out Firebase Studio.

**14:14** · Firebase.studio is our URL. Um I'm also on all the platforms uh at Rodie Davis.

**14:21** · Um you can also find me um uh anywhere uh in the Google groups and things like that. So yeah, I really uh thanks for having me on and uh hopefully uh you know there's more to talk about soon.

**14:34** · Thank you so much and it was great to have you. Have a nice day.

**14:37** · Awesome. Thanks.

**14:39** · \[Music\]