As the work on ImGame came to a spot where we wanted more tester, we decided to look into ways of having a beta program.  The most commonly used way is to use TestFlight, an awesome framework that helps iOS developers doing just that.  Unfortunately i’ve used this service before, and wasn’t a fan of having to make my possible users sign up for a third party app before signing up for ours.  I began to scour the internet for a better way, and luckily there is one.

Its a rather simple process but i was surprised how many of my iOS dev friends weren’t aware of it.

I definitely think this is a much easier, although you don’t get all of the nifty features that test flight offers.

The post i linked above is a bit outdated so ill do a quick updated refresher, assuming you’ve read the above post.

When you have your product ready to send to beta testers, just selected product, then archive:

After the project builds and archives, the screen will show some basic information of your app.  One thing to note is the “Estimated App Store Size”.  While it usually seems to be a high amount, it goes down a bit once the app is submitted.  Click on the distribute button.

You’ll then be asked the option of what you are saving the Archive for, choose the Enterprise or Ad-Hoc option.

After choosing what provisioning profile to build with, you’ll then be allowed to choose where you are saving the file, and have some options to fill out:

As the image shows, make sure you link to the ipa using the same name you saved it under.

After you have all that uploaded to the appropriate locations, a simple anchor tag will help you load the file:

You can add that anchor tag in any styled page you want! Have your iOS user go to your page in their phone to click the link, and they should be able to download the app straight to their phone.

Heres the page that we used for imgame.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask!