The region is where your cloud phone physically runs. It decides two things: how quickly your taps reach the phone and its picture comes back, and where the phone's own internet traffic leaves from.
Closer is smoother
Every tap travels from you to the phone, and every frame travels back. Choosing a region near you shortens both trips. The app measures this for each available region while you are choosing and shows the result beside it, in the same bands the viewer uses:
| Round trip | Shown as |
|---|---|
| under 50 ms | Excellent |
| under 100 ms | Good |
| under 200 ms | Fair |
| 200 ms or more | Poor |
The figure is measured from your device over your connection at that moment, so it changes with your network. A dash means the region could not be reached in time to measure it.
Greyed-out regions
Regions we plan to serve are listed even before they have servers, so you can see where the service is going. One with no servers right now is shown greyed out with a short note, and cannot be selected. When servers arrive there it becomes selectable on its own; nothing to update.
Today, phones can be created in US East (Ashburn).
What the region does not change
- The price. Packages and terms cost the same in every region.
- Which apps you can install. The Play Store on the phone follows the Google account you sign into it with, as on any Android device.
Traffic leaves from the region
Websites and apps on the phone see an address in the region you chose, not yours. If you need the phone's traffic to leave from somewhere specific, routing it through your own proxy is the way to do that.
A region cannot be changed after the phone exists. If you picked the wrong one, create a new phone in the right region and copy across what you need.
Still stuck? Write to us and we will answer.