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.

Then a trivia app we had just uploaded to Play got seven reports in a single day. The texts were ospuuq , pzxoim , caokah . Six lowercase letters each. All seven came from the same OnePlus 8 Pro, all on app version 1.0.0.

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.

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.

What we changed

Test Lab devices report the system setting firebase.test.lab as "true" .…