Google’s latest Pixel Studio update is a major downgrade

Google introduced its Pixel Studio app with the Pixel 9 series as a fun way to show off some of the AI capabilities of the hardware, generating scenes and creating stickers based on your ideas. While that’s been nice for what it is, availability’s been a bit limited, with the app only supporting Pixel 9 and 10 handsets, and these days we have much more broadly accessible image generation tools like Nano Banana. What does that mean for the Pixel Studio’s future? Well, it’s not good news.

If you’ve installed the Pixel Studio’s most recent update (version 2.2.001.864530193.00-release, for those of you keeping score) you may have already spotted something missing. First, here’s a reminder at how the app has been working:

Users have been able to create content through that magic wand icon. And then once you generate some stickers, you’ve been able to insert them over the image.

But with this new Pixel Studio release, that’s all gone. Instead, we’re left with just some very basic markup tools:

So what the heck is going on here? Did a developer accidentally disable part of the interface? It turns out that this doesn’t appear to be any mistake at all.

Google provided a statement about the update to the team over at 9to5Google, confirming the intentionality of that change. The company plans to “re-direct Pixel Studio users to Nano Banana in Gemini while offering an easy export tool for all your creations.” That means you won’t immediately lose any existing stickers you had, but with the tools to create new ones already vanishing, we would not waste any time in getting that export started.

It’s a bit of an ignoble fate for the app, but it doesn’t look like Google’s in any hurry to get rid of it entirely, and the markup-only version could still stick around for some time to come.