Google announces the “Cloud Test Lab,” a free, automated testing service

SAN FRANCISCO—Making sure an Android app works correctly on the thousands of different Android devices out there can be daunting for developers. Any given device can have a different Android version, screen resolution, aspect ratio, and performance envelope when compared to another. There are lots of Android testing services out there that aim to help with this problem, but Google is finally going to offer a first-party option to developers though the Play Store developer console.

Today at Google I/O, Google announced the "Cloud Test Lab," an in-house Android app testing service. Submit your app to the developer console staging channel and Google will perform automated testing on the Top 20 Android devices from around the world. The "Top 20" tier is free, though Google plans to eventually expand the service to more than the top 20 devices through a paid service.

The service will allow developers to "walk through" their apps on the selected devices, and if they run into any crashes, they'll get a video of the app before the crash and a crash log to help them debug things. Google says the service will help catch layout issues and show-stopping bugs and allow developers to spot bugs with low-RAM devices.

Cell phone signal mapping service OpenSignal publishes a yearly "Android Fragmentation" report, which looks at the myriad of devices that the service sees. In 2014, the service saw over 18,000 different Android devices—a 60 percent jump from the company's 2013 report. Google's own statistics say that only 0.7 percent of devices are running the latest version of Android. Compare that to iOS, where Apple says 82 percent of devices are running the latest major version. Only a handful of different iOS device models have even been built by Apple.

Android's wide hardware selection has given it 75-80 percent of the worldwide smartphone market, but wrangling all those devices into a consistent platform is a tough challenge. While the top 20 devices is probably only a tiny sliver of that, the service shows that Google is at least trying to help with the problem.