AWS Device Farm now lets you get remote access to phones and tablets

Cloud infrastructure provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced an interesting update to its Device Farm service, which allows users to test their applications on real mobile devices. Rather than just deploying an app and seeing what happens on a plethora of available devices, people can now get remote access to individual devices and do things like personally test out app behavior with the keyboard and mouse.

The feature is available in beta, initially only on Android devices. Support for iOS devices will come later this year, AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post.

AWS first launched Device Farm last July. A few days after that, Amazon confirmed that it had acquired AppThwack, a startup that provided remote device testing services.

In the public cloud market, AWS competitor Google Cloud Platform has a service for remotely testing applications on real mobile devices, the Cloud Test Lab. But pricing details are not currently available, and at least for now the service does not offer the sort of granular remote access that AWS’ Device Farm does now. Startup Bitbar’s Testdroid service does, though.

After a free trial of 250 minutes using a device in AWS Device Farm, the service costs 17 cents per minute, or $250 per month per slot — slots are “units of concurrent execution,” Barr wrote.