How to share the current status of an application in development

Question

I am going to develop an iOS application for a customer of mine and I would like to make him constantly up-to-date during the development phase. In order to do so, I am looking for a tool which should allow me to share the current status of the application with my customer. The goal is to allow my customer to personally run the latest prototype of the application on a kind of simulator/emulator or on his own device (either iPhone or iPad). Is that possible? Is there a tool (or a set of tools) which I can use to do so?

In case it is not possible, as far as I know the only alternative is to take screenshots or record videos, right? Just let me know if I am mistaken.

Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

The best way, I know of, is TestFlight.

This allows you to upload an AdHoc build of your app to there server and allow you customer to download it.

They even supply an SDK which can alert the user that a new version of the app is available also you add some debug functionality to the build (reading crash reports).

Answer 2

If you want to do, one elegant solution would be to use a continuous integration server to pull the code from your repository, make an adhoc build and place it somewhere publicly accessible.

The whole solution can take some time to set up and depends quite a lot on how is your development environment. In my company we are actually doing it with Jenkins and some shell scripting. If you Google a little bit about continuous integration of iOS projects with Jenkins you'll find some information.

Answer 3

Might not be the best way to do it, but I can't trust online repositories like TestFlight.

Not the easiest but rather secure workaround for this;

• Get your customers device into your developer account
• Create your new development provisioning profiles (consisting that device)
• Distribute your application via Archive, and save it
• Send your IPA to your customer