Wes Matlock

✈️ TestFlight Isn’t Just a Step — It’s a Skill You Need to Survive

When you first hear about Apple’s TestFlight, it sounds harmless. Push a button. Share a link. Watch your app make the rounds. Cue slow…

✈️ TestFlight Isn’t Just a Step — It’s a Skill You Need to Survive

When you first hear about Apple’s TestFlight, it sounds harmless. Push a button. Share a link. Watch your app make the rounds. Cue slow clap, right?

Except… that’s not what happens.

If you don’t own your TestFlight process, it’s going to own you. And let’s be honest — nothing feels worse than scrambling to fix a broken beta rollout with a product manager breathing down your neck. Been there. At Frontier Airlines, even tiny bugs during beta testing could snowball into delays that grounded whole testing schedules.

And lately? TestFlight management keeps popping up in interviews. Companies are grilling candidates on it. And if you can’t talk about it like someone who’s been through the fire… you’re toast.

Let’s make sure you’re ready.

🚀 Internal vs External TestFlight Testing: Know the Rules of the Road

TestFlight splits testers into two groups, and they’re very different:

👉 Pro move: Use internal testers (your team) to catch “facepalm bugs” before burning precious time waiting for external beta review.

👥 Using External Groups: Your Secret Weapon

You might think external testers are just one giant pile of users. Nope. TestFlight lets you create External Groups — and they’re insanely useful.

Here’s why you should care:

  • You can create multiple groups (e.g., “QA Team”, “VIP Users”, “Random Public”).
  • Each group can test different builds — so one group could test a hotfix while another group experiments with a brand-new feature.
  • You can limit public links per group — control who joins and how many people jump in.
  • You can monitor feedback separately per group — perfect when you’re testing different feature sets at once.

🚨 Important: Even with groups, the 10,000 tester limit is per app, not per group. You can’t sneak past it by creating extra groups.

🎟️ Ways to Invite Testers — and Where It Breaks

Two ways to bring in external testers:

  • Direct email invites: Tedious but precise.
  • Public links: Super fast. Anyone with the link can install… theoretically.

⚡ Reality check: Even public links sometimes ask for an 8-digit invite code.

Here’s the real deal:

  • When you create a public link, the 8-character code is embedded inside the link itself.
  • Example: https://testflight.apple.com/join/abcd1234 — here, abcd1234 is the code.
  • If TestFlight glitches, users might be asked to manually enter that code.

💪 Always send both the public link and the code together. Save yourself the 2am Slack fire drill.

Example to send to testers:

Link:https://testflight.apple.com/join/abcd1234Code (if needed): abcd1234

🥺 Top TestFlight Nightmares You’ll Meet (and How to Outsmart Them)

  • 90-Day Build Expirations:
    Builds self-destruct after 90 days. No pop-up, no reminder. Set a calendar alert when you upload — or wake up to “the app disappeared” emails.
  • Beta Review Time Roulette:
    Could be 20 minutes. Could be a week. Never, ever trust Apple’s “average review time” promises.
  • Missing Export Compliance Info:
    Encryption questions on uploads? If you miss them, enjoy your rejection email.
  • Testers Can’t Find Updates:
    TestFlight doesn’t always auto-update apps. Tell your testers to open the TestFlight app and pull to refresh manually.

🛠️ Best Practices That’ll Save Your Bacon

Automate Your Uploads

Don’t manually upload builds like it’s 2017. Use Fastlane:

# Fastfile  
platform :ios do  
  desc "Upload to TestFlight"  
  lane :beta do  
    build_app(  
      scheme: "YourAppScheme",

👉 Tips:

  • Replace "YourAppScheme" with your actual Xcode scheme.
  • Use groups if you want to auto-assign builds.

🚀 Pro move:
At Frontier, we wired this into Azure DevOps to automatically uploaded a fresh TestFlight build.

Use External Groups Smartly

Create groups like:

  • QA Team
  • VIP Beta Testers
  • “Wild West” Public Testers

Assign different builds and track feedback separately. Don’t just throw 10,000 strangers into one chaos bucket.

Unit Test Critical Flows

Broken onboarding = instant beta review rejection. Cover yourself with lightweight Swift Tests for important flows:

import SwiftTesting

@testable import SetlistTrackerApp

struct OnboardingTests: TestCase {  
    func testOnboardingCompletesSuccessfully() async {  
        let viewModel = OnboardingViewModel()  
        await viewModel.startOnboarding()

        XCTAssertEqual(viewModel.onboardingStatus, .completed)  
    }

    func testUserCanLoginAfterOnboarding() async {  
        let viewModel = LoginViewModel()  
        let loginResult = await viewModel.login(username: "testuser", password: "password123")

        XCTAssertTrue(loginResult.isSuccess)  
    }  
}

👉 Tips:

  • Focus tests on critical user journeys: onboarding, login, in-app purchases.
  • Hook into CI to block bad builds before they even hit TestFlight.

Set Expiration Warnings Early

Don’t trust your memory. Here’s a shell script to warn you at 60 days:

#!/bin/bash

BUILD_UPLOAD_DATE="2024-06-01" # Replace this  
CURRENT_DATE=$(date +%Y-%m-%d)

DAYS_SINCE_UPLOAD=$(( ( $(date -d "$CURRENT_DATE" +%s) - $(date -d "$BUILD_UPLOAD_DATE" +%s) ) / 86400 ))

if [ "$DAYS_SINCE_UPLOAD" -ge 60 ]; then  
  echo "⚠️ Warning: Your TestFlight build is over 60 days old! It will expire soon."  
fi

👉 Tips:

  • Run weekly in your CI system.
  • Send Slack alerts if you want to be fancy.

💬 Interview Nugget

When an interviewer asks:

“How do you manage external beta testing?”

Drop these points:

  • Internal vs External setup
  • External Groups targeting
  • Public link + invite code backup
  • Beta expiration traps
  • Upload automation
  • Swift Testing to guard critical flows

You’ll sound like someone who’s actually shipped — not just read blog posts.

🛬 Real-World Beatdown: Lessons from Frontier

At Frontier Airlines, we had hundreds of testers across different departments — gate agents, pilots, scheduling staff. One missed expiration window? Boom. No testing. No feedback. Dead sprint to recover.

We learned (the hard way):

  • Create external groups by job role.
  • Pre-stage backup builds.
  • Always monitor expiration dates manually AND through scripts.

TestFlight wasn’t just part of the process. It was the process.

🏁 Wrapping It Up: TestFlight or TestFright?

TestFlight will absolutely mess with you if you’re not prepared. But if you master it, you’ll ship smarter, faster, and with way fewer “oh no” moments.

When the testers ask,
“Where’s the app?”

You’ll already have the answer. When the interviewer says,
“Tell me about your beta testing process?”

You’ll have stories they can’t fake.

Let’s ship. 🛫

🎯 Bonus: More Real-World iOS Survival Stories

If you’re hungry for more tips, tricks, and a few battle-tested stories from the trenches of native mobile development, swing by my collection of articles: https://medium.com/@wesleymatlock.

These posts are packed with real-world solutions, some laughs, and the kind of knowledge that’s saved me from a few late-night debugging sessions.

Let’s keep building apps that rock — and if you’ve got questions or stories of your own, drop me a line.

I’d love to hear from you.

By Wesley Matlock on April 29, 2025.

Canonical link

Exported from Medium on May 10, 2025.

Written on April 29, 2025