Testflight – On the fly Build management for Apps

When you want to get your apps developed by an Apps development company such as Krify, you certainly need to ensure that the company is actually developing as per your needs. Most of the matured development companies make sure that they will show live demos during the development for feedback. When the project is in beta testing phase (showing the “To be released” product to customer feedback and acceptance), it is very much important to make sure that customer tests the app thoroughly.

The real challenge in Apps beta deployment is sending an app to the customer without connecting the customer device to the computer. This is a very tedious job for non-techie customers.

Test flight and its on the air build management:

Test flight is a free testing service for mobile developers, managers and testers. It is a service for distributing test builds to beta testers (customers), on live. It
is a free platform used to distribute beta and internal iOS/Android applications to team members over-the-air. It improves iOS Beta Testing Process and also a new tool for mobile developers for testing iOS4(iPhone,iPad) applications.

Instead, developers just upload their builds to their TestFlight account while testers download the build directly on their phones.

Developers can then manage testing and receive feedback from their team with TestFlight’s Dashboard.

TestFlight follows Apple’s beta and internal distribution guidelines which includes the following:

1)When an app is built and needs to be sent out to multiple devices it needs to be built with a distribution provisioning profile (Ad Hoc or Enterprise)

2)Once the binary has been compiled with a valid distribution provisioning profile and packaged as an IPA, it is ready to distribute.

Getting Started with Test Flight:  (as a Tester /Customers to beta test the build)

1. As a tester using TestFlight, you can either be invited, recruited by the development company.
2. Once you sign up with TestFlight and login to the dashboard for the first time, you will be asked to connect your device, allowing developers to access the device’s Unique Device Identifier (UDID) or have the ability to install Android apps on your device.
3. Once you have successfully connected the device to your account and have been accepted to a team, the developer will have to add the UDID to the application, so that you can install it on your device.
4. Once the developer uploads a build you will receive an email through TestFlight, from the developer, with a link to install the build.
5. Follow the instructions in the email, click on the link, download the build to your device, and you will be ready to begin using the app.

Testflight SDK

TestFlight Software Development Kit (SDK) is a library that can be added to any iOS app for tracking analytics in beta/ internal testing and can also be used with apps in production (available in the App Store).

Using this users (both developers / clients) can acquire more information on how and what testers are doing when testing an application on their device

The SDK works for both beta versions and live versions available in the App Store.

It allows you to track how beta testers are testing your application. It requires iOS 4.3 or above, the Apple LLVM compiler, and the libz library to run. The SDK also offers a remote logging solution. Find out more about our logging system in the “Remote Logging” section.