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December 17, 2013 10:39 am GMT

All I Want For Christmas: A Beta App Store

yellow_app_store_icon_by_thearcsage-d36r7ovNotice: You must submit your basically untested app now or your holidays will surely be ruined. If you don’t, you’ll miss out on all those downloads that your app probably isn’t ready for anyway. Your call. Merry Christmas. Okay, Apple doesn’t actually issue such an alert, but they might as well. The App Store is about to shutdown for holiday break this Saturday. And so I felt it was a good time to reflect on where we are with regard to the marketplace heading into 2014. The answer, as best I can tell from talking with innumerable developers over the past year, is still very good — but it’s not exactly great. And it should be great. More specifically, the state of testing and releasing an app has gone from more-or-less untenable to the nightmare we all knew it would become. The time is now: Apple needs to come up with a real solution to allow developers to distribute and test their apps before they launch on the App Store. These launches have never been more critical. And they’ve never been such a crapshoot. Apple needs to address this and fix the current solutions that just aren’t working. Currently, if you wish to test your app before launch, you have two solutions: TestFlight or HockeyApp. TestFlight has long been the favored approach, leading up to their sale a year and a half ago to Burstly. HockeyApp has come on strong as of late, likely due to TestFlight’s large number of bugs alongside recent iOS updates. (Note that I’m not mentioning Apple’s own 100 test device allotment for regular iOS developers because such a number for any sort of actual testing is absurdly low. And worse, those 100 devices are set in stone for a year — even if you delete them from your account.) TestFlight and HockeyApp are far from ideal from the perspective of both the developer and the end user. The process to install and use both services is at best arduous and at worst, sheer insanity (how many times can your provisioning file just. not. install?). And let’s be clear: both are hacks. Both require a user to install a provisioning profile on a device which Apple undoubtedly would prefer everyone not do, but turns the other way. These installations, which require a full security bypass, are the antithesis of what Apple preaches with the App Store.

Original Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/t7Nh65KMqIk/

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