Hi all,
As I found in the hard way, the beta version crash when app is opened after 30 days in beta proecss.
Is there something to do with this? (except installing the app from the app store or uploading a new beta version).
Beta testers started opening crash issues becasue they don't know its because the expiration, and I think its very unfriendly to just crash the app without any alert to the user.
Thanks.
This is a general limitation when using TestFlight. Apple probably wants to prevent that Testflight can be used to distribution Apps to users outside of the AppStore, so they enforce a strict expiry policy. The App runs for 30 days and will then stop working. You can update your beta within this 30 day period, so beta testers can update and then get again 30 days. The 30 days limit is documented by Apple and also the TestFlight App will tell the user about this limit. If you think this is not enough, you should tell your beta testers about it as well.
The alternative would be to go the "old way" by distributing your App via iTunes with AdHoc provisioning profiles. This way you need to register the UDIDs for each device yourself, you are limited to 100 devices in total, but the beta will run until the provisioning profile expires (AFAIK these profiles needs to be renewed every year).
I have reported this as a bug report and Apple engineers told me that it should not be happening unless you have two different beta versions from a single developer.
So, for instance, if a user has a beta that has expired he will get an error message about that instead of a crash (effective since iOS 8.3). However, if a customer has two different apps from the same developer installed via Testflight, launching one of them will result in a crash if it has expired.
This is absolutely a bug. There's no way that the apps should be crashing on launch. This caused no end of consternation with us a few days ago, simply because our tester hadn't realized that the apps had expired.
Apple, please fix this.
Just a follow up: Apple changed the behavior, so now you have 60 days instead of 30, and when it revokes user will have an alert states that the beta app will no longer open.