Sauce Labs today announced general availability of the Real Device Access API, giving developers a programmable mobile testing infrastructure that offers device-level controls with no testing framework required.
With AI capabilities built into the device and OS level, the tools that developers have relied on to test mobile applications have failed to keep up with the new ways in which apps are consuming hardware resources.
In talking to customers, Sauce Labs came to learn that developers want to get direct access to the devices for testing, and they want to be able to run tests on the device through standard frameworks like APM and Espresso, Sauce Labs Chief Product Officer Shubha Govil told SD Times. “But what if developers were not able to get were device-level details, and often those frameworks don’t allow them to access some of those capabilities – especially when they are trying to understand details around, for example, is my app driving more memory? Is it driving more storage? Is it heating up the device,” Govil said. “It’s some of the device-level logs that are super important for them to understand the impact of their application, beyond just testing a standard functional workflow.”
Security was another use case customers were requesting, Govil said. “It is important for performing some root detection, like destructive root detection, malware testing, the type of data in the device,” she noted, and the customers want more details about the device, performance and data directly. “That’s where we knew that we have to ensure the programmability is available on top of our mobile device infrastructure,” Govil said.
What Govil said she has learned through her years of experience in the industry, with Twilio and Cisco before that, is that once you expose a capability through API, not only are you enabling the use cases that customers demand, but you’re giving them options to take things even further. “That’s what we did by exposing through programmability this data set, this capability. Now developers can choose even more scenarios that we might not have heard of so far,” she explained. “This is where the next-generation innovation comes in. The users can depend on our API to pull the data and then see what they want to drive with it.”
All of this gives developers the ability to run mobile testing more directly through the API, leveraging the CI/CD tools they were orchestrating for their APM and Espresso type of applications that supported those frameworks, Govil said.
According to the company announcement, engineers can allocate devices in seconds, issue Android Debug Bridge (ADB) commands for Android devices or xcrun-style commands for iOS devices, stream live video and logs, manage files, and maintain sessions up to 24 hours—all through HTTP requests. The persistent session model eliminates the setup-and-teardown cycle of traditional testing, with early adopters reclaiming up to 40% of device time usage. And with high-fidelity video streams optimized for Computer Vision and an MCP-Ready architecture, the API also serves as the perfect bridge for AI-driven testing, allowing autonomous agents to interact with devices as native tools.
“The future of mobile quality isn’t another testing framework — it’s giving developers the programmable layer they need to build for the AI era,” Govil said in the announcement. “Every mobile device is now an intelligent device with AI built into the hardware and the OS. The testing infrastructure has to reflect that reality, and that’s exactly what we’ve built.”
The Real Device Access API is available now as an add-on for the Sauce Labs Real Device Cloud private devices. For documentation and access, visit https://saucelabs.com/resources/blog/breaking-free-announcing-the-sauce-labs-real-device-access-api
