OpenSTF stopped. Your device lab did not.
Here is the honest map.
The original openstf/stf has been archived for years. DeviceFarmer carries the maintained fork and is still the right answer for a lot of teams. This page is for the other case: you never wanted to operate a device lab, you wanted a real phone for an hour.
Three replacements, and who each one is for.
There is no single successor to STF, because STF was solving two problems at once — remote control of a phone, and the operation of a rack of them. Which replacement fits depends on which half you wanted.
- DeviceFarmer, self-hosted
- The maintained fork of STF. Take this if you need root, custom ROMs, modified hardware, or devices that must never leave your building. You keep the phones, the hosts, the power and the wipe policy.
- A large device cloud
- Take this if the requirement is a broad model matrix — dozens of manufacturers and OS versions on every release. Six identical Pixel 7a will not do that job and we will not pretend otherwise.
- DeviceRent
- Take this if what you actually wanted was one real phone, reachable in seconds, billed by the minute, with somebody else owning the rack. Native ADB, your own toolchain, no proprietary client.
The parts of an STF workflow that still work here.
If your team lived in STF, most of the muscle memory transfers. The device is real, the access is ADB, and nothing is wrapped in a bespoke UI you have to learn.
- Remote control in the browser
- A live H.264 mirror with touch, a real shell and real logcat in the tab. Live sessions need a Chromium-based browser — Chrome, Edge, Brave or Opera.
- Your own adb, not ours
- On a paid plan, devicerent-connect makes the rented phone appear as a local adb device, so Appium, Espresso and gradle point at it unchanged.
- Device booking
- Reserve a device and it is yours until you stop. You can hold up to three at once and drive them side by side on one screen.
- No rack to operate
- Power, USB topology, connectivity, Android updates and the wipe between renters are ours. That was most of the actual cost of running STF.
- A real wipe, enforced
- A device is not rentable again until a wipe has been reported, recorded in an append-only trail. Fail-closed: no record, no next renter.
- Hosted in the EU
- The rack lives in the Netherlands, which is usually the answer to the data-residency question that follows a hosted-device proposal.
€0.10 a device-minute, €10 to start.
The list rate is €0.10 per device-minute. Signing up and confirming your email leaves €10 of starter credit in the wallet with no card required. Paid plans cut the rate — Pro takes it to €0.01 a minute — and a dedicated slot removes the meter entirely if you want a phone permanently reserved to you.
Stay on DeviceFarmer if any of these are true.
These are not roadmap hedges, they are current facts about the rack. If one of them is a requirement, self-hosting really is your answer and this page has done its job by saying so.
- You need root, Magisk, Xposed, or instrumentation that requires elevated privileges. Every phone here has a locked bootloader, verified boot enforcing, and no su binary.
- You need custom ROMs or hardware you have physically modified.
- You need devices that never leave your own premises.
- You need a broad manufacturer and OS-version matrix. The rack is six Pixel 7a.
- You need iOS. There is none.
- You need adb reverse, Maestro or Detox specifically. None of the three is supported today.
Questions
- Is OpenSTF actually dead?
- The original openstf/stf repository is archived and has not taken meaningful work in years. DeviceFarmer is the maintained fork and is actively developed, so the accurate statement is that STF moved rather than ended.
- Can I migrate an existing STF setup to DeviceRent?
- There is nothing to migrate in the usual sense — you would be retiring a rack rather than porting a configuration. What transfers is the automation: point Appium or Espresso at a local adb device created by devicerent-connect and your existing suites run unchanged.
- Do I get root, like on my own STF devices?
- No. Every phone runs a locked bootloader with verified boot enforcing and no su binary, and that applies to us as much as to you. If root is a requirement, self-hosted DeviceFarmer is the correct tool.
- How many devices can I hold at once?
- Up to three at a time, and they can be driven side by side on a single bench screen. A dedicated slot reserves one device to you permanently with the per-minute meter switched off.
- What stops the previous renter's data reaching me?
- A between-renter wipe is enforced before a device becomes rentable again, and every wipe is written to an append-only evidence trail. Separately, all six phones are provisioned as device-owner managed devices, which locks down accessibility services and non-system keyboards.