Perhaps the most important part of software development is acquiring feedback from users. There are multiple efficient ways to do this for mobile app development. Two of the most prevalent are Firebase App Distribution and Testflight. Here are the pros and cons of each and what we use them for.
Testflight is Apple’s solution to distribute iOS apps to users that are willing to test your app. Being from Apple it was always going to be a streamlined, painless process, however there are still a couple drawbacks. Here are the main advantages:
The main disadvantages are as follows:
Firebase is Google’s suite of products catering to app development. App Distribution makes up part of this. It’s fairly easy to set up and useful for various reasons. Here are the main advantages:
The main disadvantages are:
We use both Firebase App Distribution and Testflight to gather user feedback, our internal policy is to use Firebase App Distribution when the app uses a staging or dev API as opposed to a live one. It’s an extra layer of security to ensure that we don’t accidentally publish an app that uses the wrong API.
You may be in a similar situation or you may prefer one over the other, both are tangible solutions to gather user feedback.
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