Introducing the Developer Device Platform for agentic mobile app development

Most enterprises connect with their customers through a device. Whether it’s using a mobile app to order a product, contact customer service, view content, or manage their account, the customer experience depends on how well an app can run locally on the customer’s device.

For this reason, building and testing applications across a wide variety of devices is critical for any enterprise launch that involves locally running components. However, procuring and hosting devices at scale is expensive and complex, and tests are often flaky, inconclusive, or just difficult to debug. This leaves many developers to test launches on the physical phones in their pockets and hope the results apply to most devices. 

To solve this challenge, today we are excited to announce the public preview launch of Developer Device Platform (DDP) on Google Cloud. DDP is a fully managed cloud platform that provides instant, on-demand access to multiple hardware profiles across real physical devices and high-concurrency virtual emulators. DDP represents an evolution of Firebase Test Lab for Cloud developers, and is also the first device platform built for agentic development. With DDP, developers can now utilize their preferred agents to vibe code apps, run tests, debug,  and optimize performance across devices efficiently and quickly.

Build and test your apps to guarantee performance

In the standard mobile development lifecycle, developers iteratively build new features, run QA tests to ensure performance across a variety of target devices, and ship the optimized and debugged feature to production for their users. Developer Device Platform offers two main functions to accelerate this cycle:

Interactive debugging with Device Streaming: With our Device Streaming API, developers can directly access an emulator or physical device of their choice, and vibe code, iteratively test, debug and interact with the app remotely. Device streaming makes it simple to dive into your customer experience, and scroll and click in real time, all while also monitoring performance on the real device hardware.

Parallel testing with Device Run: With our Device Run API, developers can write tests as part of their CI/CD pipelines and run them in parallel across hundreds of different devices at once. With the results, developers can pinpoint and debug specific device issues, and ship code to production with confidence that it will run across device tiers.

Accelerate mobile app development with DDP agent skills and efficient tests

The rise of coding agents in mobile development specifically opens up new possibilities when paired with physical devices. Coding agents can interact and test on the real hardware, helping them take advantage of unique phone screen sizes (e.g., foldable phone UI) and specialized hardware (e.g., CPUs vs GPUs). 

Developer Device Platform will soon integrate with Android Studio and Android CLI giving you direct access to physical devices via Device Streaming API. The DDP agent skill will also allow you to work with the AI coding agents of your choice to accelerate development. With DDP agent skill, coding agents can:

• Execute multi-step user journeys independently

• Spot visual artifacts

• Analyze real-time chip performance on-device

• Rewrite your code to fix hardware specific bugs and/or optimize for unique phone features

In addition to these agentic capabilities, DDP also enables developers to package apps and launch parallelized tests with smart sharding, giving you access to results across hundreds of devices in minutes. With smart auto-retries, DDP also retries specific tests that fail within your shards, helping you get past errors faster without rerunning your entire suite of tests.

Start building with Developer Device Platform today

Starting August 12, Developer Device Platform is available in public preview to all Google Cloud users. During public preview, users are charged based on a pay-per-minute model so you pay only for the active testing minutes you consume, with rates differing for emulator vs physical devices.

We can’t wait to see how Developer Device Platform can help mobile developers across Google Cloud accelerate their development and take advantage of the growing number of unique device features and on-device AI possibilities.