Like many Google Antigravity users, I was very excited about the Antigravity 2.0 announcement at Google I/O 2026.
Who would't be enthusiastic about the new cost efficient Gemini 3.5 Flash? Plus, a standalone desktop app form factor that seems to rival Claude Code and OpenAI Codex at that!
There are a lot of great things to be eager to try it out but I want to provide some pointers in the upgrade and migration to save you some headaches and hassles later.
The upgrade path from Antigravity 1.0 to 2.0 is straightforward:
- At the Antigravity 1.0 user interface, there should be a button that asks you to restart the app to update.
- Follow the steps to install Antigravity 2.0, including logging into your Google account linked to the app.
- There's a call-out to install Antigravity IDE in addition to 2.0.
- When you're done with the upgrade, you will be asked about customizations.
Now here's the key point: Antigravity 2.0 is a huge departure from 1.0 in the sense that it is functionally no longer based on Microsoft's VS Code. That means a huge majority of all the personalizations from 1.0 will not carry over to 2.0.
Yes, there was a quick patch that would let you import your customizations, including a migration flow that allows users to import settings, extensions, and keybindings from Antigravity 1.0. (Imagine a very eager person like me making the upgrade before this patch was applied). However any history and past work you've done in extensions like Claude, Cline, and Codex will not be carried over. Even your work history with the Gemini agents in 1.0 will not be ported.
If you want to retain as much information from your 1.0 setup, here's the playbook I wish I'd had on day one.
Back up before you click update. Specifically, copy ~/.gemini/antigravity somewhere safe. The migration has a known quirk where past conversations, scratch space, and agent brain entries get stranded in ~/.gemini/antigravity-backup rather than carried into the new app. If you've already updated and your chat history looks gone, it isn't — that's where it went. You can rsync the backup directory back into ~/.gemini/antigravity (skip mcp_config.json, you want the new one) and restart.
Say yes to installing the Antigravity IDE alongside 2.0. The IDE isn't being sunset — it's positioned as a sibling product, still maintained, still the VS Code fork you remember. That's where your keybindings, extensions, and editor muscle memory live. The cleanest mental model: 2.0 is for agent orchestration, the IDE is for everything VS Code-shaped you already do. Just don't run both against the same working tree simultaneously — you'll fight yourself.
If 2.0 isn't your speed yet, you can stay on the IDE. Uninstall 2.0, install Antigravity IDE 1.23.2 from the releases page, set updates to manual. There's no forced migration deadline on the IDE side — the deprecation pressure is on Gemini CLI users (June 18, 2026), not Antigravity IDE users.
The mental note that helped me most: this isn't a version bump. It's Google shipping a second product that shares a name with the first. Your 1.0 work doesn't need to migrate — it needs to coexist. Once I stopped expecting parity and started treating 2.0 as a new tool in the kit, I felt better about this (but still licking my wounds from the re-work and missing stuff).
Top comments (6)
Appreciate the heads-up on the
~/.gemini/antigravitybackup quirk — that's the silent killer with agentic IDE migrations. I've seen the same pattern with other forks: chat history and per-agent state live in directories that the new shell doesn't know to import, and you only notice a week later when a long-running agent loses its context window of conversational priors.The "treat 2.0 as a new tool rather than an upgrade" reframing is the right call. When the underlying editor changes (VS Code → custom Electron shell, in this case), the assumption that extensions, keybinds, and MCP server configs port cleanly is what trips most teams. Curious — did you find that workspace-level
.vscode/settings.jsonor any MCP server registrations needed manual re-wiring on the 2.0 side, or did those carry over? That's usually where the second wave of migration pain shows up.Thanks for sharing this. The “this is not really a version bump” point is a good way to frame it.
When a tool keeps the same name, it is easy to assume your settings, extensions and history will move over like a normal IDE update. But this sounds more like a workflow change than a simple upgrade.
The backup tip is very useful too. That is the kind of thing people usually learn only after the update has already happened.
wish i see this first before updating my antigravity
This was helpful thanks mate!
great tips on migrating from Antigravity 1.0 to 2.0, especially the emphasis on the customizations after the upgrade. if you're ever looking to streamline your app development, check out Moonshift - it helps you build and deploy a full next.js + postgres + auth app in around 7 minutes, and you own the code on your github. happy to offer you a free run to see how it fits your workflow.
I am about to update my Antigravity and this post helped me a lot. Thanks!
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