Google Cloud announced the public preview of Developer Device Platform (DDP), a fully managed service for testing and debugging mobile applications on real physical devices and high-concurrency virtual emulators. DDP evolves Firebase Test Lab for Cloud developers and is positioned as the first device platform built for agentic development.

Enterprises rely on device-based customer experiences through mobile apps, but procuring and hosting many devices is expensive, tests are often flaky, and debugging is difficult. DDP aims to solve this by providing instant, on-demand access to multiple hardware profiles.

DDP offers two main functions. Device Streaming lets developers directly access an emulator or physical device remotely, interact with the app in real time (scroll, click), and monitor performance on the actual hardware. Device Run is a parallel testing API that integrates into CI/CD pipelines, allowing tests to run across hundreds of devices simultaneously. Results help pinpoint device-specific issues before shipping.

DDP will soon integrate with Android Studio and Android CLI, granting direct physical device access via the Device Streaming API. The DDP agent skill enables coding agents to execute multi-step user journeys independently, spot visual artifacts, analyze real-time chip performance, and rewrite code to fix hardware-specific bugs or optimize for unique phone features. DDP also supports smart sharding and auto-retries for parallelized tests, retrying only failed tests within shards.

DDP is available in public preview starting August 12 to all Google Cloud users, charged on a pay-per-minute model with different rates for emulators and physical devices.