Hi all,
I have been having an absolute nightmare with testflight and the new way that apple wants us to distribute builds, it has taken more than 20 emails backwards and forwards from/to Apple to resolve a few issues I was having getting my users to access new builds, not all users just a couple of them had significant problems, I have lost two of my best testers in this process which has really upset me. The issues are around the fact that you cannot adhoc provisioning profiles anymore, meaning you want to add a user then this is a new build of the app, completely stupid.
I have question I have put to Apple (no reply yet) about if they are going to continue the old testflight website or is everything moving over to the new process, because if they are dumping the old process at some point then testflight is no good to me anymore, let me describe the issues.
The new process uses the terms internal testers and external testers, to be an internal tester you need to have an iTunes connect account, none of my testers have this all of my 30+ testers would be considered external testers.
Only internal testers can access builds that have not gone through the review process, so external testers can only access builds that have been reviewed by Apple, so gone are the days when I get a bug report, fix the bug, build a new version and distribute it to those testers within minutes, we are now talking days before they can gain access, to be fair to Apple they say that only the first build will go through a full review and subsequent builds MAY not, but they might be reviewed.
All builds have a 30 days lifespan, then you have to submit a new build to the testers, so essentially you would every 21 days rebuild the app to make sure that if a review takes about a week your testers have continuous access to your app.
You can only have 30 beta builds per release, well this is a non starter, take my current app, it has had over 200 builds released to the testers and we are still months away from release so the 30 build limit is completely non workable for me.
The new system can only be used by IOS8+ users so all backward testing has to be done by you, which again does not work for me as my testers have been picked because of the wide range of devices and versions of IOS I still have a significant about of my users on IOS5 this is due to the changes in google maps in versions after that, that my users were not happy with and so a large number are still on IOS5 (more than 40% of my 3,000+ users still use IOS5).
I am actively looking for an alternative to testflight because of the above the process does not work for me anymore unless they are going to keep the old site running.
Here is one alternative that I am looking at.
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/betabuilder-for-ios-apps/id415348946?mt=12
atb
alex