Alternative to Testflight?

[strongbow]

Are there any alternatives to Testflight for testing our in-dev apps with other users?

I found this online as a generic topic, but think most have some sort of integration process with an app.

https://www.playtestcloud.com/blog/test ... os-android

Would love to hear what everyone (anyone) does for this!

cheers

Alan

[Mikey]

If you aren't doing a public beta, and instead are doing something private, look at AirLaunch. It's a LC project. We use it to distribute internally and for our corporate customers.

[strongbow]

Thanks. For some weird reason, I'd thought that AirLaunch was no longer useable. I'll have a look!

Anyone else using other methods?

cheers

Alan

[Mikey]

airLaunch still works. There is going to be a problem on October 3, when DB stops allowing you to serve renderable HTML, but AirLaunch still works, as of yesterday, the last time I put a build out using it.

[SparkOut]

Can you explain a bit more about the HTML problem from 3rd October? I need to advise someone about an in house iOS deployment and was going to suggest he buys airlaunch. What workaround could be used?

[Mikey]

Once people figured out that they could use Dropbox to host websites for free, they started taking advantage. Dropbox has decided to put an end to it. Now, if you give someone a link to an HTML file, they can load it from dropbox, but it won't render. Part of what airLaunch does is build a special web page that embeds a special link that tells an ios device to download an app and install it. The reason why a web pages is so convenient is that you can let your users bookmark it, and when there is a new version, just tell them to hit the bookmark to get the new version.

Since Dropbox has not been very helpful in explaining the situation (all we have is a single paragraph announcement), and the announcement just came out, last week, all we have is speculation. Will a workaround be straightforward, even if it isn't easy? There are some possibilities:
1) Find another service that can be used to host for free.
2) Host the webpage and app somewhere else, such as on a company's internal server, or with its main website, but bury the page so that it isn't linked to any of the main pages so that the public can't find it.
3) Instead of using a page on dropbox, embed the HTML in an email to users to notify them of an update.

Is there a problem with TestFlight? I think some people are still using it, and with the "beta version" checkbox in LC8, I would guess that it's working fine (but I don't know that).

[strongbow]

This might be interesting for people, something that I found today and tried out - and it seemed to work ok, quite easy to use and no setup required for simple stuff... and free for that too.

https://www.diawi.com/

Apparently works for iOS and Android, but just tried it with iOS so far.

HTH

cheers,
Alan

[jacque]

All three of Mikey's suggestions will work. The diawi link is also a solution for those who are comfortable trusting their apps to a third party in the cloud. AirLaunch's primary advantage is the automatic building of the .ipa files from directly within LiveCode, and that still works fine. The distribution method of the files is a secondary feature.

AiirLaunch has always supported direct upload of the files to any server you have access to (Mikey's method #2) and emailing the link rather than just dropping the html file into Dropbox is only slightly less convenient than before. I'm not sure if any other free services will work (method #1.) It's been a while since I last tested, but Box, Drive, Copy (now defunct) and SugarSync did not allow linking from an html file to other files on the service.

In short, AirLaunch still works well to create ad-hoc distribution files. As of Oct 3, distribution of the files will be limited to a server you control or email (unless I can think of something else. Suggestions welcome.) One thought I had was to change the html file it creates to a plain text file. The user could copy the link from the body of the text and paste it into a browser. That might be a little quicker than emailing the link to yourself but I'm not sure how well it would be received by users since it requires an extra step.

[SparkOut]

Thanks jacque and Mikey,

The plan for my contact is to use an in-house server anyway so the info is a relief. Sometime soon (ish) you might expect another purchase jacque.