A small device lab feels like a win in the early days. A few phones, a couple of laptops, maybe a Linux box for Android builds, and suddenly your team can run mobile tests without waiting on anyone.
That was the experience Diego Molina, a Selenium project lead and field solutions engineer at Sauce Labs, walked through in a recent webinar, The Hidden Tax of DIY: Why Using In-House Devices Slows Your Ship Cycles. He’s lived this story firsthand, and the arc he described is one that many growing engineering teams will recognize.
Where DIY actually makes sense
Diego didn’t open with a pitch against building your own infrastructure. He introduced the topic with an honest case for it. When a team is small, co-located, and iterating quickly on an early-stage app, a handful of local devices can be exactly the right amount of investment. You don’t need a platform. Instead, focus on unblocking yourself enough to start testing, and a local setup is effective for achieving that.
That setup is precisely how Diego’s team started at a previous company: a local Xcode server, a Linux machine for Android builds, a few laptops, and a small set of plugged-in devices. Mobile testing worked. It was, in his words, genuinely fun.
Where the cracks start showing
The initial setup went smoothly, but the subsequent experiences were challenging. As the company grew, more teams needed access to the same limited devices. Complicating matters, the team itself was split across two cities, which meant the infrastructure that lived in one office was now a bottleneck for people working somewhere else entirely.
The deeper problem? The gap between how the team was testing and how real users were actually experiencing the app. Diego’s team had been testing in a clean, controlled office environment — full battery, stable Wi-Fi, known device states — but real users were outside on the street or in the subway with patchy 4G or 5G connectivity, running apps on devices that hadn’t fully charged since the morning. None of that was visible from a desk in the office.
The real cost nobody budgets for
Device procurement is a mere 10% of the problem, according to Diego. The other 90% is the platform required to simulate real-world conditions, secure access across teams, support parallel test runs, and keep pace with a hardware market that ships new device form factors every year. None of that shows up on a line item, but it is reflected in headcount, sprint capacity, and the eventual realization that engineers hired to build product are now forced to maintain device infrastructure instead.
What starts as a fun part of the gig becomes maintenance work no engineer signs up for: patching web views after every Chrome release, physically walking to unlock a stuck device, debugging failures that were nearly impossible to reproduce without deep operating-system-level tooling, etc. A test runs faster when you don’t have to debug it twice, and DIY environments make that single-pass diagnosis far harder than it needs to be.
Owning devices was never the real goal
The question mobile teams eventually land on evolves from “how many devices do we own?” to “how quickly can we access the right one when we need it?” That reframing shifts the entire problem from infrastructure ownership to infrastructure access, which is precisely the gap a cloud-based real device platform is built to close.
Sauce Labs Real Device Cloud gives teams on-demand access to thousands of real Android and iOS devices — no procurement queue, no maintenance burden, no device sitting idle in an office two cities (or multiple time zones) away.
Even better, Real Device Access API lets developers reach a cloud-hosted device as if it were sitting on their desk locally, complete with live network throttling, geolocation mocking, web view traffic inspection, and full diagnostic visibility into what’s happening behind the scenes. Now, your engineers can get back to building product instead of running a part-time device-maintenance shop.
DIY is rarely a bad place to start, but it’s a difficult place to stay. Your local lab can’t simulate where your users actually are, and every hour spent on device maintenance is an hour not spent improving the product customers are buying, which directly affects revenue.
Watch the full webinar to see Diego’s live demo of real device testing and the Access API in action, or reach out to the Sauce Labs team to talk through what migration looks like for your workflow.
