Alibaba's Qoder Introduces Mobile Use Plugin for Cross-Platform AI Agent Testing
Alibaba's AI coding platform Qoder released the Mobile Use plugin (Beta), enabling autonomous AI agents to build apps, interact with UIs, and verify code changes on Android, HarmonyOS, and iOS devices. This closes the execution and validation loop for mobile development agents, which previously stopped right after generating code. It solves a major bottleneck in mobile AI agent workflows by automating post-coding observation, interaction, and verification on real or simulated hardware. By adapting to native developer toolchains instead of enforcing a simplified abstraction layer, teams can leverage existing local setups without extra test hardware. Mobile Use routes commands through native tools: ADB and Instrumentation on Android, HDC and ArkXTest on HarmonyOS, and Xcode Simulator with XCTest on iOS. Additionally, the system explicitly reports missing capabilities in an environment rather than returning false success indicators.
## BACKGROUND
Qoder is Alibaba's AI-assisted development tool offering autonomous agent modes for code generation and refactoring. In mobile engineering, controlling test environments relies on vendor-specific bridges—such as Android Debug Bridge (ADB) for Android or OpenHarmony Device Connector (HDC) for HarmonyOS—to drive automated UI test runners like ArkXTest or XCTest.