Not sure what to make of this but my initial thought was how can anybody even as a job adequately and honestly “test” 200 apps at any one time?
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That’s a lot of betas. It’s a decent list of suggestions, though. Most of them would benefit people who are only in a handful of betas. It’s good to design for heavier usage than you think is realistic or appropriate if only because it usually improves the experience for everyone.
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For some developers it might already be valuable that some beta testers just use the beta version of their Apps instead of the App Store build, without hunting for bugs, but reporting them if they appear.
(Or I hope so, because I also have a lot of TestFlight versions installed. Definitely not 200, but still more than the reported 20-40 average).
I do recognize most, if not all, of the issues John wrote about and hope Apple can/will improve the TestFlight experience.
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That was mine also. I’ve tested quite a few commercial programs over the years and know that it takes time to get familiar with one. We’ve discussed that fact on this forum in regards to note taking apps.
I’m not worried about TestFlight. My question is should I trust the opinion of someone who may average around 12 minutes a week evaluating a beta program?
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Who needs 200 apps, anyway? A browser, Mail, Fantastical, DEVONthink, Curio and Obsidian get me through the day just fine.
Katie
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Some pain on the developer side of TestFlight, too, when there are a lot of testers and feedback. This is by Ken Case:
We try to process it, but it’s actually much harder for us to work with because the developer side of TestFlight is so hard to work with. (For example, I just tried to open the site to see what TestFlight feedback we currently have, and after getting all the way to the right screen it kicked me back out to the login screen.)
(I’m working my way to that screen yet again, and each click on that path leads to another page which takes 8-10 seconds to load.)
OK, I’m finding that if I press “End” to scroll to the end of the page, then wait for it to load before doing any more scrolling, it doesn’t crash the page (so I don’t get sent back to the login screen). But it only loads a dozen or so at a time, and I do have to wait for it to finish loading all the content I scrolled past, and I can’t tell when it’s done that. So I got to some 231-day-old feedback before I pressed “End” too early and got knocked out again.
(The window I’m working in is bigger than I usually make my browser windows—1,300 x 1,000—but as I try to scroll through the list it’s formatted in a way that only lets me see four pieces of feedback at once. So that’s a lot of scrolling, and it’s hard when every scrolling interaction risks kicking you back to the login screen.)
There’s also no way for us to track which bits of TestFlight feedback have been processed other than to delete them altogether. So that’s what we do, once we’ve copied the feedback into our own tracking system.