Hey, this is the daily overpass, my name is Eric and I make apps!
Now today, let's talk about the benefits and drawbacks of beta builds.
Ok so today I wanna answer a question that came in a couple of days ago on episode 378
from Siddharth Shakya who said "today I launched my new app with beta version.
Can you make a video to explain what are the drawbacks and the benefits of launching an
app under beta version".
Now Siddharth to be honest with you, and I'm ashamed to admit this, for my own apps I've
never done a beta version.
I know I should because I know we've got lots of users, I'll just put things out there and
sometimes it backfires like I talked about on the GDPR consent form last week - that
I got all these bad reviews immediately and I had to pull it.
That's not a good strategy but...for me, it's always been hard for me to find beta groups
and I don't really have a lot of people that I could get the beta tests.
I mean, I probably could if I wanted to but I just haven't.
But for clients, we've done it a lot.
Here's a tool that we use for beta testings, on iOS we obviously use test flight, I'm very
familiar with that, I've done so many releases to test flight for clients.
On Android on google Play it used to be really difficult, you used to have to set up a google
plus group and everything like that, I think it must be easier now because google plus
is no longer in the operation but I haven't used it.
I still use the one that I was using before which is, we use something which is called
test fairy and that's free for up to 10 apps and then it's ridiculously expensive if you
have more than 10.
It's a typical app economy - everything is really inexpensive until you just pass that
one threshold and then you talk about hundreds of pounds a month.
so what I'm always doing is removing the old apps and adding the new apps and everything
like that, and it works really well because you don't need to ask what is the email address
of the google play account and all this kind of stuff when you're setting up those test
users to add them on there, you can just send the email out and they can just do whatever.
That's usually the big drawback with me, it's like, they'll send an email address but they
have 2 or 3 email addresses and I need to find out which one did you register on google
play with and they say I didn't know and we spend all this time there.
So, I use test fairy and I use test flight.
So, the benefits and the drawbacks.
it's difficult with the, when you talk about clients and everything like that, obviously
the benefit is that you get to try something out before you go live.
You can put it out there and have people use it, find out if there's any bugs, if there's
any feedback early on, it's obviously a good idea and everything, especially with clients
it makes them feel a lot better if we can go live.
Now, the drawback is you have to find lots of people to do it and if you're an indie
developer you might not have all those kind of friends to do it.
And also, when you're asking your friends and coworkers and everything like that to
try out your app saying "hey, can you please just spend a bit of time doing it?" they wanna
help you out, so they don't wanna give you advice like "yeah no, it's fine, I think it's
really good" or whatever, because they feel like they're not adding value, so they'll
look for little things that aren't really an issue.
So if you put it out there they'll say "some people might think that icon is ugly, I think
it looks fine but some people might" or "some people might be confused by this" or "some
people might be this...i thought it was fine...whatever", and you're like "I don't want you to guess
what other people do", and so then all of a sudden you've got all this scope creep which
is the other major drawback.
It could be the major drawback, this goes more towards working with clients because
if it's your own app, you find these things early on.
If it's a client application and you put it out into beta version, you obviously wanna
find all the bugs, you wanna find stuff early but you also need to make it very clear that
we're not adding functionality, we're not changing functionality, if we do we have to
quote for it because we built it up to this point.
The finish line is right there and we're just about to cross it and at this point, we can't
introduce any changes.
Or we can but we have to make sure that they get charged for because as a developer, scope
creep is something that you're always looking for and the beta build, when you hear something
like that you think "ah, I don't really wanna have scope creep but it does really help.
And it's such a simple process.
it used to be test flight used to be really difficult because it would only give you like
30 days of the beta build and sometimes I've had clients test for six months, now it's
like 2 months.
Actually it might be 90 days, no it's 90 days now on test flight and on test fairy you can
just do it for as long as you want.
So those are the builds that I use and for those of you guys out there who do a lot of
beta builds, let me know in the comments how you guys do it because I know that this is
an area that I'm lacking in.
Siddharth, I'm just telling you what I know and what I've done in the past but for those
of you guys out there who have a bit more experience with this, i'd love to hear what
you guys have to say and anyway, that's it for today! I'll talk to you guys tomorrow!