How an Interactive Entertainment Technology Company Extended Its Public Device Farm Coverage with a Private One
An interactive entertainment studio filled the exact gap public device farms left open — hard-to-find Android and iOS devices, accessed through APIs and wired straight into existing CI/CD pipelines, using AstroFarm.
Business Overview
This case study focuses on an interactive entertainment technology company whose mobile games reach players across a wide and fragmented device landscape. Validating a release means testing on the exact phones and tablets real players use — including older models, regional variants, and less common configurations that fall outside the long tail of mainstream hardware.
At a Glance
A private device farm filled the exact gap public device farms left open — hard-to-find devices, accessed entirely through APIs, plugged straight into existing CI pipelines.
The Challenge
The company already relied on public device farms for most of its testing. That wasn't the gap. The gap was everything those providers didn't stock:
- Hard-to-find devices had no home. Older models, regional variants, and less common configurations simply weren't available on the public device farm platforms the team already used.
- Automation needed programmatic access, not a dashboard. The team's workflows are automation-first — querying device availability, selecting devices by parameter, and reserving them inside CI pipelines. A web console wasn't going to fit that.
The Solution
The studio deployed AstroFarm, 42Gears' private device farm solution, to extend its existing public device farm coverage — not replace it.
Deployment: AstroFarm runs alongside the team's existing public cloud device farm usage. Common, widely available devices stay on the public cloud. Hard-to-find Android and iOS devices connect to AstroFarm instead.
What changed operationally:
- API-first device access: The team pulls device details, filters by parameter, and reserves devices programmatically — all through AstroFarm's APIs.
- CI/CD-native testing: Jenkins, GitHub, and GitLab integration means builds run against real hard-to-find devices as a standard step in the pipeline, not a manual side process.
- Automated build deployment. App Manager pushes new game builds to the right devices automatically, so every test run starts on the latest version without manual installs.
- Faster debugging. Terminal Access and File Manager let engineers pull logs and crash data straight off a device through the same API-driven workflow — no physical access required.
- Live device visibility. Fleet Monitor shows which devices are in use and which are free in real time, so engineers aren't competing blind for the same hardware.
Results
- Full device matrix coverage, without duplicating anything. Public device farms and AstroFarm together cover the complete matrix the team needs.
- Automation pipelines run unattended. Device selection, build deployment, and reservation all happen through API calls — no manual device-picking.
- Faster failure diagnosis. Direct log and crash-data access cuts the time between a failed test and a root cause.
- Higher device throughput. Live visibility into device status means less idle time waiting to find a free device.
Why It Matters
Public device farms are efficient for common, high-volume device coverage — but they were never built to stock every device, especially the hard-to-find ones that still matter for real-world testing. A private device farm that extends rather than replaces public farm coverage lets teams close that gap with API-first, automation-ready device access, without disrupting the tooling already in place.
Try AstroFarm
Testing devices your public device farm doesn't stock? Extend your existing testing setup with a private device farm built for the devices public farms leave out.
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