A device farm you can rent one phone from.
Six real Pixel 7a, by the minute.
A device farm is a rack of real phones wired to a host and reachable over the network. Most of them are sold as enterprise contracts around a proprietary UI. This one is six Pixel 7a in the Netherlands, rented by the minute, driven with the adb you already have.
Real phones, a host, and a way in.
Strip away the branding and every device farm is the same three parts. The differences that matter are who operates the rack, what the way in looks like, and whether the phones are physical at all.
- The phones
- Physical handsets, not virtualised Android. Real sensors, real cameras, real thermals, real timing — the four things emulators quietly get wrong and then hand to your users as bugs.
- The host
- Something holding a USB connection to each phone. Ours is a Raspberry Pi 5 with all six Pixel 7a on it, running the bridge that brokers every connection.
- The way in
- Native ADB, not a bespoke client. A browser session for interactive work, and a local adb device for Appium, Espresso and CI on paid plans.
- Presence, not guesswork
- Every device reports a heartbeat every five seconds. What the fleet page shows is what the rack is doing, not what a stale database column last remembered.
- Isolation between renters
- A device is not rentable again until a real wipe is reported, and the gate is fail-closed. All six phones are also provisioned as device-owner managed devices.
- One jurisdiction
- The rack is in the Netherlands. There is no fleet scattered across regions to reason about for data residency.
Six phones is a small farm, and that is the trade.
A large device cloud exists to give you breadth — dozens of manufacturers and OS versions on demand. This is the opposite trade: a narrow, identical rack you can be inside of in about a second, at a price that makes leaving a phone running for an afternoon a non-decision. If you need the matrix, buy the matrix.
- What you get
- Depth on one device. A phone reachable in seconds, held as long as you like, up to three at once, with your own toolchain pointed at it.
- What you do not get
- Breadth. Samsung, OnePlus and Xiaomi hardware is on the roadmap and is labelled as roadmap everywhere on this site, including the fleet page.
- What that costs
- €0.10 per device-minute at list, €10 of starter credit with no card, and up to 90% off the minute rate on a paid plan.
When a bigger farm is the right purchase.
These are current facts about the rack rather than roadmap hedges. If one of them is a hard requirement, a larger provider is genuinely the better buy.
- You need a broad model matrix across manufacturers and Android versions on every release.
- You need iOS. There is none, and none is planned.
- You need root, Magisk or Xposed. Every phone has a locked bootloader, verified boot enforcing, and no su binary.
- You need web or browser-matrix testing. This is device hardware, not a Selenium grid.
- You need to drive sessions from Safari, an iPhone or an iPad. Renting is disabled there until we can verify on real Apple hardware.
- You need guaranteed capacity at a fixed hour without reserving it. Six phones is six phones — a dedicated slot is how you make one always yours.
Questions
- Are these real phones or virtual devices?
- Real Pixel 7a handsets on USB. There is no virtualised fallback: a simulated-session mode existed until September 2026 and was removed after it let a live rental swap to a fake screen while still billing. A rental that cannot get real hardware now fails instead.
- How many devices can I use at the same time?
- Up to three concurrently, and they can be driven side by side on a single bench screen. A dedicated slot reserves one permanently with the per-minute meter switched off.
- Where is the hardware?
- In the Netherlands. All six phones sit on one host in one jurisdiction, which is usually what the data-residency question is really asking.
- Do the phones have SIM cards?
- No. Connectivity is provided over USB from the host rather than over wifi or a mobile network, which keeps the phones off any shared network and makes their traffic path explicit.
- What stops a renter leaving something behind on a phone?
- Two things. A between-renter wipe is enforced before the device is rentable again and is recorded in an append-only trail, and every phone is a device-owner managed device, which blocks accessibility services and non-system keyboards.