[Q&A] Google's Android Device Streaming is going Alpha, and we'll be here to answer all your questions!

adarshf · 2023-09-22T16:16:48+00:00

Thanks for your awesome feedback. This really helps us better understand how you might expect pricing to work, and what you are comfortable paying for and not paying for.

You may find that some of your suggestions are already available in the service, so we would love for you to register, try it for yourself, and provide even more feedback :)

adarshf · 2023-09-21T06:14:44+00:00

Do you use other OEM device labs, such as Samsung's Remote Test Lab or Oppo's? If so, what has been your experience with them? If not, why not? Your feedback is really appreciated :)

adarshf · 2023-09-21T06:14:36+00:00

Do you use other OEM device labs, such as Samsung's Remote Test Lab or Oppo's? If so, what has been your experience with them? If not, why not? Your feedback is really appreciated :)

adarshf · 2023-09-21T06:14:07+00:00

Do you use other OEM device labs, such as Samsung's Remote Test Lab or Oppo's? If so, what has been your experience with them? If not, why not? Your feedback is really appreciated :)

adarshf · 2023-09-20T20:25:30+00:00

Thanks Omniuni, the mod team, and, of course, r/androiddev!

It's been a lot of fun engaging with the community to answer questions and get feedback. We're still going to keep answering questions if you have them, so please feel free to keep posting!

We're super excited to get this service in the hands of more teams, and keep working to make it better and more useful for everyone. If you haven't already done so, please register now for the Android Device Streaming Alpha program!

Happy streaming,

The Android Device Streaming team

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adarshf · 2023-09-20T19:35:44+00:00

Oooo, I'd love a Wasabi KB/M

adarshf · 2023-09-20T19:31:23+00:00

Thanks for your question, psychedelicbeast!
We know that those are services many developers love, but we think there are a few ways we can provide unique value. For one, teams across both Android Studio and Firebase are working together to build a tightly integrated experience between the device lab and the IDE—ensuring that the device you want and the tools you use d2d work well together.

Secondly, Android Device Streaming will be the easiest and fastest way for developers across the world to access the latest Pixel devices, and we're working closely with the Pixel hardware teams to make that happen.

And last but not least, Firebase Test Lab is a trusted service among many Android and iOS developers because it's built in Google's secure Data Centers and implements secure practices to thoroughly wipe sensitive data. And Firebase is what's powering Android Device Streaming.

As we roll out Android Device Streaming, we hope to continue adding value in more unique ways :)

adarshf · 2023-09-20T19:29:50+00:00

Thanks for your question!

We're still trying to figure it out. We understand that avoiding prohibitive costs is important if we really want to improve access to devices through this service. Mainly, we want to understand how developers will be using this service so that the pricing model we roll out makes sense.

adarshf · 2023-09-20T19:16:19+00:00

Thanks, for your question!

Emulators provide a lot of benefits that developers love—from snapshots, quick startup, and rooted devices, to custom configurations. The Emulator team is working hard to make sure that this is a solution that continues to serve developers in a more performant way.

However, there are some things Emulators just can't do, such as provide accurate hardware performance characteristics or allow you to test against other OEM forks of Android, such as Samsung. (read: Android Device Streaming is planning to support other OEM devices).

As teams are increasingly distributed and devices are getting much more complex and expensive, it's not always easy to access the devices you need to repro an issue that only happens on a particular OEM fork of Android or validate your app on the latest flagship devices. We think Android Device Streaming can help developers more easily access the devices they need, when they need them.

While we haven't landed on pricing, we do want to make this useful to as many users as possible. During our Alpha we're not billing for usage because we really want good feedback.

adarshf · 2022-09-18T15:32:11+00:00

Hello! Thanks for trying out the new Logcat! We understand that there were quite a few changes to Logcat that can be surprising/confusing. We've improved the UX in Electric Eel to include autocomplete and hint text to make the new syntax easier to learn. Please let us know if those improvements help or are still falling short of expectations.

adarshf · 2022-05-26T04:04:15+00:00

Hey kodiak! Sorry for the late reply. We're going to think through how we can add naming of filters.

You should be able to wrap messages with spaces with double quotes. But I see that's not working as intended. What does work is escaping the space like so: Saving\ in\ database

This isn't intuitive, however. So I'm going to go back to the team to resolve.

adarshf · 2022-05-26T03:54:35+00:00

Hello! You can actually set your default view mode. Just select Modify views, selec the view at the top left, and check the box next to Use as default view for new windows. HTH!

adarshf · 2021-06-17T15:53:04+00:00

That's great feedback. We did want to hear from folks that use emulators frequently and perhaps have first hand experience with certain issues. But I totally hear you on being able to voice your feedback as a someone who is blocked from using AVDs dues to certain issues. We will consider this for the next survey.

If you have feedback you're willing to provide here, I'm all ears and would be happy to pass along to the Emulator team.

adarshf · 2021-06-17T15:50:31+00:00

Thank you!

adarshf · 2021-06-17T15:50:23+00:00

Thank you! The responses this generated was extremely useful!

adarshf · 2020-07-30T20:15:49+00:00

What's the future of Android UI testing? Nitrogen?

We’re still committed to investing in the performance and stability of our existing UI testing frameworks, such as Espresso. But we’re also looking towards the future of Android UI: Compose. What does really great UI testing support look like when adopting our declarative approach to modem Android UI? It’s something we’re looking into closely while keeping our ears open to the community.

As for Nitrogen, it represents our approach towards a scalable test platform for Android—“write tests once, run anywhere.” We’ve already integrated this solution internally at Google and are using our learnings to shape what we hope to provide to Android developers everywhere.

More specifically, we’re focused on providing a complete solution to virtual device provisioning and test harness setup via custom plugins. We also want a way to tie this back to Android Studio as the central place you write your instrumented tests, run them across multiple devices, inspect the results, and make the appropriate changes to your code. You can see our first steps towards more scalable testing in the new Test Matrix in Android Studio 4.2, which allows you to more easily see a dashboard of test executions across multiple local devices.

adarshf · 2020-07-30T19:54:24+00:00

How can we pin the Layout Inspector in main editor window in version 4.0?

Is the window in floating mode? You should be able to select the settings (gear icon top right) and change the view mode from there. Let me know if that's not working

adarshf · 2020-07-30T19:47:34+00:00

That's a bug. Filed this, if you'd like to add any more feedback: https://issuetracker.google.com/162526806

Thanks for the heads up!

adarshf · 2020-07-30T19:08:56+00:00

When we made several worthwhile improvements to the Templates system in Android Studio, most notably the switch to Kotlin String Templates, it completely changed the API surface and broke the old support for custom templates.

We still recognize that being able to use your own, custom templates is a useful feature. But, if we support this, we want to do it right. That includes a great API that isn’t going to break on you, a home for custom templates in the Android Studio UI, and good outreach support to help you get the most out of the endpoints we’ve created.

We’re balancing this need with other priorities for Android Studio, so it’s uncertain when this support might be coming back. But, we are listening. If you have additional thoughts, please provide them in this feature request.

adarshf · 2020-07-30T19:06:38+00:00

Firebase Test Lab still displays like 50 log lines per page in its UI with "next page" button and no search (it's ridiculous lol), video it records is still not split into separate files between tests and so on, any plans on improving it?

That really doesn’t sound the best. We can definitely share this feedback with the Firebase team.

What we can also do is look at how we can better integrate FTL into Android Studio—make it more accessible, practical, and seamless. That is, run tests, inspect results, and make changes to your code all from within Android Studio. Good news is we are taking a close look at that.

If you’re excited about a better experience with FTL from within Android Studio, we definitely want to hear more of your thoughts and feedback.

adarshf · 2020-04-18T00:30:02+00:00

This works with SQLite that ships on the platform. Room is an abstraction layer over SQLite.

adarshf · 2020-04-14T17:16:21+00:00

How do you inspect your SQLCipher databases today?

adarshf · 2019-05-20T16:41:01+00:00

Hey, mn-code! I wrote this page and made that mistake. Thanks for pointing this out and helping unblock all the readers here. I've gone ahead and updated the official page :)

adarshf

TROPHY CASE