An Android emulator online: test your app on a cloud Android phone in the browser.
Test an APK in the browser
- Sign up and open Phones. New accounts get $2 of credit, about 33 phone-minutes, with no card.
- Create a phone. Pick the country it appears in. The first start often takes about a minute.
- Upload your APK from the Apps tab: any signed APK up to 500 MiB, debug builds included. Play Store apps install through the Play Store app on the phone.
- Use it. Click to tap, drag to swipe, scroll with the wheel and type into the focused field. Back, Home and Recents sit under the screen.
- Park it when you're done. Billing stops, and the app, its data and your test account stay for next time.
What testers get beyond an emulator
| Local emulator | Phonebox in the browser | |
|---|---|---|
| Setup | Android Studio, SDK, a system image, hardware acceleration | A browser |
| Evidence | Screen capture tools you set up | Record the screen in the Recordings tab; download the MP4 |
| Show a developer | Screen share or a video | A live link they open in their browser, from 1 minute to 24 hours |
| Location and language | Emulator settings per AVD | Set location, locale and timezone per phone |
| Next day | Whatever is left on your machine | The parked phone, exactly as you left it |
| Hand it to an agent | ADB and local tooling | The same phone over the hosted MCP server |
Let an agent take the repetitive part
Once a manual pass finds the flows that matter, connect Claude Code, Codex or Cursor and let the agent repeat them on every build:
Install the debug APK on my Phonebox phone and open it.
Sign in with the test account from TEST_ACCOUNTS.md, open each tab
in the bottom bar once, then sign out. Read the screen before every
action. Report any crash, error message or empty screen, quoting the
screen text. Park the phone when you finish.More prompts in AI test prompts for Android apps.
Questions
Can I use an Android emulator online for free?
Phonebox gives new accounts $2 of credit with no card, which is about 33 minutes of a cloud Android phone in the browser. After that it costs $0.06 a minute, billed per second, and parked phones are free.
Can I install my own APK on an online Android emulator?
Yes. In the Phonebox console, upload any signed APK up to 500 MiB from a phone's Apps tab, debug builds included. The CLI and the API install the same way: phonebox apps install ./app.apk.
Is it an emulator or a real phone?
Phonebox calls them cloud Android phones: Android devices that run in the cloud and keep their state when parked. You reach them through the browser, an API, a CLI, an SDK or an MCP server, never through a USB cable.