Beta Family embraces new iOS testing workflows


    There comes a point in every app’s teenage years where you need testers to refine your product, but where do you go? You can bug your friends and family for their “oh, it’s really nice” advice, but for many app makers need someone professional to dig through your product to test usability and find bugs and quirks you may have looked over.

    Stockholm-based Beta Family was built to solve this problem by building something like a 99designs meets Yelp for testers. Digging through their directory you can find 14,000 testers from 142 different countries, and if the tester has worked with a product before, you can read reviews from previous developers about how useful they were. With the new iOS 8 features released by Apple for testing, it’s good news for Beta Family that the friction has been lowered.

    After Apple’s acquisition of Testflight, tester accounts are now tied to Apple ID’s rather than the hard-to-find UDID. Additionally the new guidelines have made it easier to run a widescale public beta of you app, although it must meet Apple’s guidelines. Under the new guidelines a maximum of 1,000 testers are allowed in beta tests, up significantly from the previous 100. Beta Family plugs into this by allows bulk uploads of their testers’ Apple IDs in iTunes connect.

    “As far as I know we’ve been the first one out supporting this, so thats great for us,” says Axel Nordenström, CEO of Beta Family. “Apple’s acquisition of TestFlight has made it much easier for companies to test their iOS apps, and it has been very positive for our growth, with a 23 % monthly costumer growth since the release of iOS 8 with TestFlight.”

    Beta Family’s customers include names like eBay Sweden and have been used for a wide variety of testing purposes. A Korean app developer, GameBerry was releasing ten apps and used Beta Family to show the government of South Korea for funding purposes that their apps were high enough quality to compete in the American, Japanese, and Chinese markets by sourcing testers from those regions.

    The Beta Family offers a free pricing option which plugs you into unrated testers, but also has a monthly plan and a pay-as-you-go option for their top-rated testers.