Amazon Web Services launches Device Farm to test apps on Android and Fire OS smartphones and tablets

Amazon Web Services today announced the launch of Device Farm, a new service developers can use to test their applications on real Android and Fire OS smartphones and tablets that reside in Amazon’s data centers.

After you run your tests on specific devices that you can choose from, you can receive reports on the results, and from there you can make changes to your apps, said Werner Vogels, Amazon’s chief technology officer, at the AWS Summit conference in New York. You can even view screenshots of devices testing applications.

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The news comes after cloud provider Google acquired mobile testing startup Appurify last year. Appurify in the past has provided iOS devices to test on, while Amazon’s new service doesn’t — but of course it does support Fire OS devices, like Amazon’s own Kindle Fire. In May Google announced Cloud Test Lab, a service based on Appurify’s technology that allows developers to test their apps on the top Android devices. Google’s Cloud Test Lab doesn’t offer iOS devices for testing.

Now Amazon will be able to better compete with Google by running tests on actual devices. That’s important in the highly competitive cloud infrastructure market. Amazon already dominates this market, with frequent price cuts and releases of new features.

The new Device Farm service will be available to use starting on Monday, Vogels said. It will be priced based on how many minutes you’re using a given device for testing.

Find out more about the new service here.

Updated on July 15 to clarify the status of Google’s services for testing apps on real devices.