Our QA team is looking for a reliable cloud device farm so we can test across a wide range of real Android and iOS devices without maintaining an in-house device lab. We need something scalable for both manual and automated testing (Appium, Selenium, Playwright, Cypress, etc.).
Right now we use basic emulators, but they’re not accurate enough — gesture issues, rendering differences, OS-level behavior… all of that is becoming a problem.
Here’s an example of a simple Appium test we’d like to run on a cloud device farm (preferably real devices):
# Simple Appium test we want to run on a real device via a cloud device farm
from appium import webdriver
caps = {
"platformName": "Android",
"deviceName": "Samsung Galaxy S22",
"app": "lt://APP_ID",
"automationName": "UiAutomator2",
"build": "Device Farm Sample",
"name": "Login Test"
}
driver = webdriver.Remote(
command_executor="https://username:accesskey@mobile-hub.lambdatest.com/wd/hub",
desired_capabilities=caps
)
driver.quit()
Looking for recommendations on the best cloud device farms based on experience with real-device testing.
In my experience, LambdaTest is one of the strongest cloud device farms for day-to-day QA work. You get a huge selection of real Android and iOS devices, including many Samsung and iPhone models with different OS versions.
As a QA engineer, what I like most is how quick it is to start a real device session. You open the dashboard, pick a device, and instantly get access. The built-in tools, screenshots, video capture, issue reporting , make manual testing way easier. If you’re trying to scale QA across multiple environments, LambdaTest saves a ton of time.
From an automation standpoint, LambdaTest stands out as a very solid device farm. It supports Appium, Selenium, WebDriverIO, Playwright, and Cypress, which means you can hook your existing test suite into real devices without rewriting anything.
The parallel device execution is what really helps , we run multiple iPhones + Androids at the same time and cut our full regression suite down significantly. Their network logs, console logs, and Appium logs make debugging failures much faster. If your automation team wants speed + consistency, LambdaTest delivers both.
As someone who oversees QA operations, the biggest value of a cloud device farm is freeing the team from maintaining physical hardware. LambdaTest provides exactly that, a stable, scalable, and cost-effective real-device lab with strong automation support.
It also integrates well with CI/CD pipelines, so teams can run mobile tests automatically as part of their development workflow. For organizations growing their QA maturity, LambdaTest is a reliable platform to centralize real-device testing without heavy infrastructure investment.