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Crowd-testing iOS app without putting app on marketplace

8 points by RuchitGarg ↗ HN
I want to be able to send invite to bunch of my friends across the world to test out our iOS app, without actually going through marketplace. Is there a way?

Primary reason I want this app to be widely tested before it hit marketplace is to make sure that app is very well tested before we formally hit marketplace.

I am sure some guy have figured out a way...looking for suggestions.

13 comments

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RuchitGarg
One way I was thinking is to put this app on marketplace using different account/app name.
dwynings
https://testflightapp.com/
RuchitGarg
Have you used it? How would you rate it?
oneiroscopist
I've used it. Works fairly well, of course your friends need to give you their device ids, and you'll make an ad hoc build.
dwynings
I've used it before, and I would consider it as close to a seamless experience as you can get. Though you are limited by Apple's ad hoc limit of 100 users.
friendstock
I rate it 10 of 10. It's pretty awesome, and the Testflight SDK has some additional functionality that's pretty useful (such as allowing testers to write comments in app).
ssutch
Hasn't been updated in a while, and has some serious bugs and usability problems in use in a real testing environment with more than 50 or so users.
aculver
Check out Pieceable Viewer at https://www.pieceable.com/ . It allows your friends to try the app out in their browser, which avoids the complexity with devices IDs and makes it manageable to get as many people as you want involved in the testing. Even folks without iOS devices!

TestFlight has already been mentioned and is great, but I find it's a pain when I've got a new test user that I have to re-generate provisioning profiles on Apple's Developer site and then rebuild the binary and push the new build back up to TestFlight. Every time. For every new tester that responds to your invite. It's a pain. Using Pieceable Viewer avoids this entire hassle.

RandallBrown
Pieceable is really neat, but it's just not gonna work for most apps that use any of the phone's hardware and it doesn't perform super well.

TestFlight is almost perfect. Lots of times people can't figure out how to register a device and then provisioning profiles get messed up and the app doesn't work for them. It's as seamless a process as you can get and still work within Apple's system. Once you get everything set up, it's quite amazing.

One last way that's super easy for users (but probably not supported/allowed by Apple) is to use the Enterprise distribution. This costs 300, instead of the normal 100 and it lets you sign your own apps for use inside of your "company." Once you get the Enterprise distribution building, you can put the app on a website and have anyone download and use it. Unfortunately, if Apple finds out about this they can ban you from the developer program. If you put it behind a password so only people you want to find it can, you'd probably be fine. I'm not sure what it takes for beta testers to count as part of your organization.

allenbrunson
Apple doesn't allow just anybody into the "enterprise" program. Your company has to have at least 500 employees and a Dun and Bradstreet number. I found this out the hard way, when a company I was working with had their enterprise application rejected by Apple.
sceneshopping
I'm not sure about the 500 employees requirement. My startup definitely did it with 5 employees, though, I know we had to get a Dun and Bradstreet number.
allenbrunson
maybe they relaxed that part recently! I'm pretty sure they told us about the 500 employee part at the time, but that was a couple of years ago.
RandallBrown
my company doesn't have 500 employees either. I didn't know about the Dun and Bradstreet number though.