Private vs shared device clouds
When a shared real-device lab is enough, and when you need a farm that only your operators can touch.
Shared device clouds are easy to try. You pick a phone from a catalog, run a session, and leave. That model wins for occasional manual QA and for browsing a wide OEM matrix you do not want to own.
It loses when the device has to stay configured, when data cannot sit on someone else’s image, or when your operators need ADB and custom system images every day.
Shared labs optimize for variety
Public clouds shine at “does this crash on a five-year-old Samsung?” You pay for access, not for custody. The trade-off is queues, residual state, and policies that exist because the hardware is communal.
Private farms optimize for control
A private farm is slower to start and cheaper to live with once the work is daily. You decide the image, the network profile, the installed set, and who may open a session. Nothing resets underneath you because another customer needed the same SKU.
A practical rule
If you visit devices, rent them. If you operate devices, own the farm.
PhoneFarm is the second path: we set up the cloud, you keep the admin keys, and the fleet grows with the work instead of with a shared catalog.