Google Cloud has opened a public preview of Developer Device Platform (DDP), a managed service that gives developers on-demand access to real Android phones and virtual emulators for building and testing mobile apps. In its announcement, product manager Derek Bekebrede and Jason Nager of product strategy describe DDP as an evolution of Firebase Test Lab for Cloud developers and “the first device platform built for agentic development.”
The pitch is aimed at a familiar problem. Buying and hosting a large device lab is expensive, and Google says tests are often “flaky, inconclusive, or just difficult to debug,” which leaves many developers checking launches on the phones in their pockets.
Two APIs
DDP is built around two functions:
- Device Streaming lets a developer connect to an emulator or physical device, interact with the app remotely in real time and watch performance on the actual hardware.
- Device Run runs tests from a CI/CD pipeline in parallel across hundreds of devices at once, so teams can pinpoint device-specific failures before shipping.
Smart sharding splits test suites across devices, and smart auto-retries rerun only the tests that fail within a shard instead of the whole suite.
Built for coding agents
A DDP agent skill lets AI coding agents run multi-step user journeys on their own, spot visual artifacts, analyze chip performance on the device and validate fixes for hardware-specific bugs or features such as foldable screens. Google says DDP will soon integrate with Android Studio and the Android CLI, giving direct access to physical devices through the Device Streaming API.
The service sits alongside Google AI Edge Portal, which Google said in May can benchmark generative AI models on more than 120 Android devices, reporting initialization time, prefill and decode speed, and peak memory use.
DDP opens to all Google Cloud users on Aug. 12. During the preview, it is billed per minute of active testing, with different rates for emulators and physical devices.
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