CODEWITHSUNDEEP
iosipad
Kerberos42
Kerberos42

Reputation: 233

How does Testflight improve app distribution?

I have a customer who is using an app on their iPads that was developed by a third party who is no longer around. The app is not in the AppStore. They were explaining to me how once a year they need to login to TestFlight.com to reset something. I looked at Testflight at as far as I can tell, its a testing platform, not for production use. I assume they are renewing the dev certificates or something similar.

Does this make sense? Is this a legal way of running a native app on an iOS device?

What are the benefits of services like TestFlight?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 383

Answers (3)

Cameron Lowell Palmer
Cameron Lowell Palmer

Reputation: 22245

Your Enterprise Certificate

Enterprise apps must be re-provisioned once a year. You will need to login to the Apple Dev Center, refresh your Provisioning Profile, resign the app, and re-upload to TestFlight.

TestFlight And HockeyApp

In addition to Testflight there is also HockeyApp.net. These are services that allow you to manage an app either during test using Ad Hoc certificates from Apple or acting as a managed AppStore when developing Enterprise apps.

It also has a number of great features, including, crash report collection, managing of testers and their feedback, update notifications on the client, test device UDID management, and verifying that the tester has actually installed the correct version.

All these things are incredibly useful to someone that has to deal with these sorts of things professionally.

Enterprise vs. Ad Hoc

Enterprise certificates from Apple allow you many of the same privileges as the AppStore. This arrangement requires you to be a business with a DUNS number and you must sign a contract with Apple that states you will use this exclusively in adherence to their terms. This costs about $299/year and the app is good for one year once correctly signed. You can install it on any iOS device in accordance with the contract you signed with Apple.

Ad Hoc is what is used for in-house testing. Each device UDID has to be added to the Apple Developer Portal, attached to the provisioning profile, downloaded, and resign the app with the new provisioning profile. Cost is $99/year, maximum of 100 devices, and devices can only be removed once a year. Each app expires after a few months.

Upvotes: 1

Marcelo
Marcelo

Reputation: 9944

TestFlight can be used for distributing apps signed with Enterprise Certificates, i.e. apps that can't be distributed through AppStore.

Another possibility is that the app is run on only a few devices, registered as test devices on a regular Developer Account. If that's the case, the limit of numbers of devices should be noticed: 100 devices.

Upvotes: 1

user2511030
user2511030

Reputation: 515

Test Flight is an apk/ipa (app binary) distribution mechanism. So they may be accepting testflight's profile on their phones if their UDID was registered to receive drops of a particular app.

Upvotes: 1

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