The Developer Device Platform is a next-generation, commercial-grade suite for remote device orchestration. Developer Device Platform is designed to provide an enterprise-scale, cloud-native offering. It acts as a managed device farm for developers to build and test applications using remote infrastructure, natively integrating with Google Cloud.
Developer Device Platform offers:
- Device Catalog - Describe all of the device types in the Developer Device Platform lab and delve into each type.
- Device Run - Run tests on devices in the Developer Device Platform lab and see the results in Google Cloud.
- Device Streaming API - Connect to remote physical Android devices and interact with your app as if it is connected to your local machine.
- Agent Skill - Give coding agents the ability to find, reserve and manipulate devices for you.
Key platform offerings
At Preview, the platform is restricted to a subset of core services, and available to Android application developers (iOS support is coming soon):
- Device Run API (AutomationJob Service): Designed for automated batch testing (such as instrumentation and JUnit tests). It uses a three-tiered hierarchy of Sessions, Jobs, and Executions to orchestrate device allocation, test runs, and result reporting.
- Device Streaming API: Establishes interactive connections, allowing developers to remotely control physical and virtual device screens in real time and communicate over Android Debug Bridge (ADB).
- Agentic Workflows (Device Action Service): A major differentiator of Developer Device Platform. It introduces an open source Developer Device Platform Agent Skill on GitHub that enables AI coding agents (such as Clockwork Code and Anti-gravity) to programmatically manage remote device sessions, run tests, capture screenshots, and execute shell commands.
What Developer Device Platform provides
The Developer Device Platform allows developers to run and monitor tests in Google Cloud:
- Platform Integration: Developer Device Platform is integrated into the Google Cloud ecosystem, with its documentation organized according to Google Cloud standards and hosted under cloud.google.com.
- Tooling and APIs: Developer Device Platform is accessible by the newly introduced
device-runcommand in Google Cloud CLI or by calling the Device Run and Device Streaming APIs directly. - Platform Support at Launch: In its initial launch, Developer Device Platform supports only Android app developers, with iOS support planned later.
- Billing: Developer Device Platform is tied to Google Cloud billing, meaning developers need a paid Google Cloud account where costs are paid directly by the users/developers.
Key orchestration benefits
By wrapping both device allocation and test execution inside a single service, users gain access to Developer Device Platform's advanced orchestration capabilities:
- Hardware Flakiness Mitigation: If an allocated device encounters connection drops or hardware failures, the backend automatically acquires a different device, restarts the test, and returns the successful retry results seamlessly.
- Large-Scale Parallel Execution: Built-in support for Smart Sharding (which uses historical execution data to partition test suites based on a target run duration) and Uniform Sharding reduces the end-to-end execution times of massive test suites.
What's next
Use our Quickstart to set up your environment for Developer Device Platform. Then follow the instructions for each workflow: