Not a Google engineer, but I do keep around a device that represents “potato” specs that I test against when doing Android development. Not a perfect solution since there’s a bevy of old/low end SoCs with varying performance characteristics, but I figure it’s better than what many are undoubtedly doing which is testing against their newish flagship and calling it a day.

I used to do the same on iOS, but came to find that performance differences on older devices there generally weren’t nearly as severe and that iOS users as a whole tend to use newer devices. When combined with reasonably well written Swift, performance on old devices generally isn’t a problem.