It seems like there is no simple solution to providing my beta iOS app to people outside of physical contact. The ways that I have found to do this WITHOUT using the App Store (which Apple explicitly says is not for Beta testing) are:
-
Use Developer Enterprise Program; Expensive and Excessive
-
Use TestFlight; Only up to a measly 25 "Internal" Testers allowed before extreme Guidelines put in place for more people (Why not just put it on App Store at this point…?)
-
Give them my whole Xcode project and have the user build it in their own Xcode environment; Impossible to ask of non-tech-savvy people + I do not want to give my project to people outside my company
-
Ad-Hoc Development; Make everyone give me their UDIDs…Huge hassle for others/ People might not want to do it outside my company
The app I am developing is going to be used by people in the scientific community to control a specific device that my company is making. There's a chance that it might never be up to Apple's standards for apps on the App Store, but could be used by more than 100 people in the near-distant future. I guess the real question I am asking is: How do I get my "sub-par" beta app to a large group of people?
Best Answer
In the past you would have to choose between Hockey app and TestFlight for large beta groups - but now that Apple has purchased TestFlight and you need to go through review to get a beta out, Hockey app's beta testing framework is the best suited to your needs listed.
It helps handle the user enrollment and management of getting builds notified and served up to end users. You still are on the hook for managing your pool of test AppleID, but now that the 100 device limit has been loosened, you can do pretty broad beta testing using Hockey and Apple's normal paid developer account limits.
Long term, you will want to get the app into one of Apple's stores since "abusing" the enterprise distribution signing is both costly in time and money to set up and over time, it's not that hard to get an app through review. Yes, you might get delayed a month or two or more, but if you persist, it's a rare app that can't deploy unless you are breaking one of the rules that Apple cares greatly about like including frameworks that use private API or that run code they download after the app has been signed and submitted for approval.
Your only other option is to ship the source code to each user and have them use Xcode to build, self sign and then install their own app. That might fly for motivated users of a specialty app. GitHub or other source tools would help you push out updates, but you'd be supporting people and possibly charge for that instead of the app itself under that model.