Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Advanced Testflight-Fu
Once you have TestFlight spinning builds out to your beta users, you can use the newly
released TestFlight SDK to take things to the next level. Specifically, you can let Test-
Flight track all of your test user's sessions, capture logs and checkpoint information,
and even deliver crash reports to you.
All you need to do is to follow the directions on the TestFlight site that document how
to enable the SDK in your app. If you do nothing else other than link in the library and
make the initialization call in your app delegate startup, you'll get start and end of
session timestamps, crash reports, and the contents of anything sent to the console log.
The one important caveat is that you should put all of the TestFlight calls inside com-
pile-time conditionalizations and make sure they are not included in the production
(App Store) build of your app.
Enterprise Distribution
If you are developing an application strictly for in-house use, or for one specific cus-
tomer, there is another type of distribution that sidesteps the App Store: an enterprise
distribution profile. You get one by registering as an Enterprise developer (which is
more expensive). Once you have registered, you can create enterprise provisioning
profiles, which can be used to create applications that anyone in your organization can
install, either via iTunes, over the air from a website, or via the iPhone Configuration
Utility.
Before you get all excited about giving Apple and the iTunes store the finger, and dis-
tributing all your applications as Enterprise applications, you should know that when-
ever an application is installed with an Enterprise signing identity, the device does a
round-trip handshake to the Mother Ship in Cupertino, and authorizes. I'm pretty sure
that if Apple starts to see thousands of people from all over the place authorizing your
app, your Enterprise license is going to get yanked pronto, and you may get a call from
the Men in Suits. So be a good developer, and leave Enterprise distribution for honest-
to-goodness internal Enterprise apps.
That having been said, Enterprise licenses make a lot of sense if you plan to have a lot
of beta testers of your applications, and they all work for your company. The Enterprise
license requires that all devices that run an Enterprise-licensed version of the App be
owned by employees of your company, and third-parties can only use the application
if an employee physically has possession of the device at all times.
In our case, we started out using a standard Ad Hoc license, and then just in the past
week (as of when I wrote these words), switched over to an Enterprise license for all of
our internal users. This had two big benefits, because we were approaching our magic
100 device limit on the Ad Hoc license, and because I was spending a significant part
of my week adding new UDID entries to the iTunes provisioning portal as people wan-
ted to join the party.
