Do you use a different app id for your iPhone beta apps?

Question

Those of us with iPhone apps (released or unreleased) are able to send out limited beta builds using ad-hoc distribution. While the Apple docs for this have a few holes in them, there are a number of blogs, postings and other articles out there on "the net" that fill the gaps.

However, one thing I haven't seen anyone mention, and I was curious about: When you do a beta build do you use the same app id as your released (or to-be-released) app?

The argument for using a different id is that the beta could then still run alongside the released app. This is probably more important if you already have a released version in the field.

An argument against is that the beta would not have access to any data the released app may have generated, and vice -versa. This may or may not be what you want on a case-by-case basis.

Are there any issues with this approach? I only have one app id registered currently, but IIRC there are no obstacles to just creating more as necessary..?

Would be interested to hear what others are doing.

Answer 1

We use the same app ID, just for simplicity. There are enough headaches in ad-hoc distribution that we don't want to confuse anybody with "why are there two apps on my phone?" problems.

Answer 2

I think it depends on how important the data in your app is. If the data is valuable I don't think beta testers would want it putting at risk, hence having a separate AppID would make sense. Of course, that also means that they won't test the application as fully either and any "upgrade" code won't get tested.

In my case (Yummy), the data is just a cache of delicious.com so a catastrophic bug in my code would mean, at worse, downloading all your bookmarks again. So I tend to use the same AppID for everything.

Answer 3

I use both different Bundle Identifiers to allow my testing team to have multiple versions of the app installed as well as different Bundle Display NAmes, so they can easily see that they are using a development or beta build and report that number back to me when issues are found.