Rented phones · early access
Real phones you never have to touch.
We buy the phones, rack them, keep them charged, updated and online, and replace them when they fail. They appear in your Cradle fleet next to your own — same screens, same schedule, same rules. You assign accounts and publish. That is the whole job.
Priced per phone, per month. Terms agreed with you during early access, and held for founding teams.
- Pixel 8Owned@northwind.studioPublishing
- iPhone 15Rented@northwind.officialIdle
- Galaxy S24Rented@northwind.launchIdle
- Pixel 7aOwned@northwindNeeds sign-in
Why rent
You want the accounts to run. You do not want to run a phone room.
Hardware is a job. It should not be yours.
Buying phones, racking them, keeping them charged, on the right OS version and actually online is unglamorous work that never ends. We do it as our whole job, so you can stop doing it on the side.
Scale for the moment, not for the year.
Ten more phones for a launch. Five fewer after it. A rented fleet grows and shrinks with the calendar instead of the capital budget, and a phone you hand back stops costing you.
Dedicated, like a real person’s phone.
Every rented phone is yours alone while you have it — one account per app, never shared, never pooled. It behaves exactly like the phone in someone’s pocket, because it is one.
How it works
From a message to phones in your fleet.
There is no rental console to learn. Rented phones are ordinary devices in Cradle — the only new thing is who owns the hardware.
- 01
Tell us what you need
How many phones, which platforms, where, and when. A form below, then a reply from a person.
- 02
We provision
Bought, racked, powered, updated, and enrolled in a Farm Agent we run. You are never asked to install anything.
- 03
They appear in your fleet
Marked Rented, with the same three states as your own phones: reachable, what it is doing, and where it came from.
- 04
Assign, publish, swap, return
Put accounts on them, schedule as usual, move an account to your own phone later, or hand a phone back when the moment passes.
What you get
Every rented phone, without exception.
A current Android or iPhone
Real, retail hardware on a supported OS. Not an emulator, not a shared cloud device.
Dedicated to you
One tenant per phone for as long as you rent it. Nothing else runs on it.
Kept online
Charged, updated, and reporting a heartbeat every twenty seconds. If it drops, you see it drop.
Replaced when it fails
A dead phone is our problem. Its replacement appears in your fleet and you reassign the account.
Labelled everywhere
Rented on the list, on its page, in every job it ran. Never mistaken for one of yours.
The same history
Every job, every step, every retry — the same audit trail as any device you own.
Owned and rented
Mix them. Move between them. Nothing else changes.
An account moves from a rented phone to one of your own — or the other way — without touching its schedule. The only difference is who owns the metal.
| Owned | Rented | |
|---|---|---|
| Who buys and racks the phones | You | We do |
| Who runs the Farm Agent beside them | You, on your machine | We do |
| Time to first device | Whenever the phone is plugged in | Days, once we confirm your region |
| Adding ten phones for a launch | Buy, rack, enrol | Ask |
| Handing phones back | They are yours | Any time |
| How it looks in Cradle | Device, labelled Owned | Device, labelled Rented |
| Assigning accounts, scheduling, history | Identical | Identical |
Being straight
What a rented phone is, and what it is not.
It is a normal phone, run properly, that you do not have to look after. It is not a way around anything.
- We do not supply accounts, identities, or connectivity tricks. You bring accounts you are authorised to operate.
- Nothing bypasses a platform’s checks. When an app raises a challenge, the job stops and asks a person — on a rented phone exactly as on yours.
- Availability is by region and by batch during early access. We would rather say no than provision something we cannot look after.
- What you do get is a phone that is on, current, dedicated to you, and visible — every minute — from the same screen as the rest of your fleet.
Early access
Tell us what you would run, and where.
We are provisioning rented fleets by hand for a small number of teams while we learn what people actually need. That is why there is a form here and not a checkout.
What happens next
- 1We reply personallyWithin a couple of days, with what we can offer in your region and when.
- 2We confirm the fitHow many phones, which platforms, for how long. Terms agreed with you, and held.
- 3Phones appear in your fleetEnrolled and online before we tell you they are ready. You assign accounts.
- 4You publishOn real hardware you have never seen, from the same composer you already use.
Not ready to talk? The simulator shows exactly how rented phones look and behave in a fleet — the label, the states, the history — with nothing to install. Open the simulator.
FAQ
Questions people ask before renting
Do I need my own phones too?
No. A fleet can be entirely rented, entirely yours, or a mix — and you can change the mix later without touching a schedule.
Is this a device cloud, like the ones used for app testing?
No. Those share devices between many customers for minutes at a time. A rented Cradle phone is dedicated to you for as long as you rent it, with one account per app, because that is what operating an account requires.
Who owns the accounts?
You do, and you must be authorised to operate them. We supply the phone; you supply the account and its credentials, which go into a vault we cannot read back.
What happens if a phone breaks?
It shows offline in your fleet the moment it stops reporting. We replace it, the replacement appears, and you reassign the account. The history of the old phone stays.
Can I get phones in my country?
Availability is by region during early access. Tell us where in the form and we will say honestly what we can do and when.
How is it priced?
Per phone, per month. We are not publishing a number during early access because we are agreeing terms with each founding team — and holding them.