The latest articles on DEV Community by Dumb Game Lab (@dumbgamelab). https://dev.to/dumbgamelab https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F4205700%2F66e40244-847a-4f50-82f9-d4bb04363bf9.png https://dev.to/dumbgamelab en Dumb Game Lab Sun, 25 Oct 2026 02:08:19 +0000 https://dev.to/dumbgamelab/our-feedback-boxs-busiest-tester-turned-out-to-be-googles-test-robot-4k89 https://dev.to/dumbgamelab/our-feedback-boxs-busiest-tester-turned-out-to-be-googles-test-robot-4k89 <p>We put a feedback button in every build we ship. Tap it, type a line, and the report arrives with the device model and the app version. Each report becomes a ticket, and each ticket starts a fix attempt.</p> <p>Then a trivia app we had just uploaded to Play got seven reports in a single day. The texts were <code>ospuuq</code>, <code>pzxoim</code>, <code>caokah</code>. Six lowercase letters each. All seven came from the same OnePlus 8 Pro, all on app version 1.0.0.</p> <p>It was not a person. It was the Play pre-launch report (Firebase Test Lab's Robo crawler), which taps every input it can find, types something, and presses the button next to it. It does this again on every upload.</p> <p>So for a day we had counted a crawler as our most active tester, and some of those tickets had already started fix attempts for a bug that did not exist.</p> <h2> What we changed </h2> <ul> <li>Test Lab devices report the system setting <code>firebase.test.lab</code> as <code>"true"</code>. A webview cannot read that, so we added a tiny Capacitor plugin that exposes it.</li> <li>The feedback widget now sends <code>where: "robot"</code> from those devices, and the ticket collector skips that value.</li> <li>We did not filter by "looks like random letters". That would also throw away the short, odd, real messages from actual players.</li> </ul> <p>The day was lost to believing a number on the dashboard, not to the fix.</p> <p>If you ship a free-text field in a mobile build, open your pre-launch report once and read what your first "users" typed into it.</p> <p>We make small idle tycoon games, in case you want to see what the robot was testing: <a href="https://qqq1212341.github.io/pcbang-alba-sim/?utm_source=dev-to-gamedev-tag&amp;utm_medium=community" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://qqq1212341.github.io/pcbang-alba-sim/?utm_source=dev-to-gamedev-tag&amp;utm_medium=community</a></p> gamedev mobile debugging firebase