What is a CloudPhone actually for?

The first time people hear "an Android phone running on the internet", the reaction is the same: what for? There is already a phone in my pocket. These five uses are what usually makes it click.

1. Your own phone does not have to run all night

Games that need overnight farming or daily logins cook your phone, drain the battery and make it useless for anything else. In the cloud it keeps going without touching your device at all.

2. Ten accounts without ten phones

Each CloudPhone carries its own device fingerprint. To the platform that is ten separate phones — not one phone being passed around, which is the easiest pattern to spot.

3. Apps with no web version

Plenty of apps exist only on phones. To run one from a computer, your options are a heavy emulator that makes your laptop wheeze, or a cloud phone that needs only a browser.

4. Testing an app on genuine Android

If you build apps, a simulator often is not enough. Some problems only appear on real hardware.

5. Getting things done from your desk

Sometimes you are at the computer and picking the phone up over and over is a waste. Having it all on one screen saves more time than you would guess.

Know this before buying

The phone lives in an overseas data centre. If the app checks location, it will look like Singapore or Hong Kong. Pair it with a proxy if you need to appear in Indonesia. And some banking apps deliberately refuse to run on cloud devices — that is their policy, not a fault.