When is the right time to enter Beta?

Comments

• ar2rsawseen Maintainer

  September 2012

  It's all based on the time you have. If you are not in hurry, you can release beta after you completed the app, when you don't have anything to add more, beta will provide feedback from others, to improve app etc.
  
  But getting feedback takes time, so if you want to do it in a defined time span, you can release minim viable product, what you think is essential and go beta before everything is completed. Sometimes it is better, because from feedback you could prioritize features and maybe even don't waste your time on some features that you wanted to implement, but feedback showed that these features where not needed.
  
  It also depend so on type of beta. If it's provide, it can be minimum viable game, if its open, you would want it as finished as possible.
  For example, we decided to use Android market for betas and release stable games on IOS. But still you don't want to publish half finished app to Android, so basically we try to publish completed app and iterate/improve on feedback from android before releasing IOS.

  http://appcodingeasy.com/Gideros-Mobile

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• Mells Guru

  September 2012

  Thank you @ar2rsawseen
  In your case how would this strategy differs when using a service like Testflight or hockeyApp for a private beta period?
  
  That means, one more step between app dev and release to the stores.

  twitter@TheWindApps Artful applications : The Wind Forest. #art #japan #apps

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• ar2rsawseen Maintainer

  September 2012

  Well actually the choice of releasing beta to android came to us naturally, as we were experimenting and polishing for a long time and still could not decide on some aspects and we just let players decide for us.
  We did not know what would happen and if this is a better choice (actually we probably still don't know how it will turn out), but all I can say that we received great feedback on features that should be improved and implemented from players that we don't even know. And we could never collect such large user base of testers/players on testflight ourselves, thus collecting this kind of feedback would not be possible for us using testflight etc.
  
  Now we at least have some confidence in app, in ourselves and we know now that we should invest more time in this app (that project was not a complete fail) and have a feeling that major release (real release) is still ahead of us (on IOS platform).
  
  

  http://appcodingeasy.com/Gideros-Mobile

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