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Installing Test Fairy on your iOS device

1. What is Test Fairy?

Test Fairy is a cloud based beta testing service. We used to use TestFlight but then Apple bought the company and made it for iOS only. Test Fairy allows your users to have a common beta testing experience whether they are using Android or iOS. In addition to providing a deployment tool for your ad hoc builds, Test Fairy provides the developer with useful analytics that help track down issues.

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2. Invitation to be a Tester

The first step in becoming a beta tester is that you will receive an email which looks like the following image. You need to open this email on the iOS device that you want to use for testing (i.e. your iPhone or iPad). Then tap on the link which says “Please click here to register your mobile device”. This will send the developer a copy of that devices UDID.

The reason that you need to open the email on your iOS device is that in order for a developer to distribute apps outside the app store, they need to include the unique device ID (UDID) of your iPhone or iPad in the build. This prevents developers from selling outside the app store as it is quite a painful process to add a UDID and each developer is only allowed to add 100 devices of each type per year. For iOS apps, we can register 100 iPad, 100 iPhone, and 100 iPod Touch devices. This is in total, it doesn’t matter how many apps you have. Each time you add a device you need to add it in iTunes Connect, update the provisioning profile, import the new provisioning profile into your build, recompile and redistribute.

A UDID looks something like this – 2b6f0cc904d137be2e1730235f5664094b831186.

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3. Registering your Device

Tapping the link in your email will open the following page in a web browser on your device. Tap on the Register Device button to send your UDID to the developer.

 

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4. Install the Test Fairy Device Management Profile

Tapping on Register Device will take you to the device management profile installation screen. Tap Install in the top right corner.

To be able to monitor and limit usage on Apple devices, a device management profile is used. This profile allows the phone to send your UDID to the Test Fairy servers.

 

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5. Authorise installation of Profile

Enter the normal unlock code for the device when asked to “Enter Passcode”. This ensures that you have the authority to install the profile.

 

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6. Confirm Installation

Tap Install (again!).

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7. Confirmation Message

All done. Any questions please contact your developer!

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Android Studio for App Development

Androidgears

At Google I/O 2013, Google launched a new Integrated Development Environment (IDE) based on IntelliJ IDEA, called Android Studio.

Android Studio provides integrated Android developer tools for development and debugging. On top of the capabilities you expect from IntelliJ, Android Studio offers:

  • Gradle-based build support.
  • Android-specific refactoring and quick fixes.
  • Lint tools to catch performance, usability, version compatibility and other problems.
  • ProGuard and app-signing capabilities.
  • Template-based wizards to create common Android designs and components.
  • A rich layout editor that allows you to drag-and-drop UI components, preview layouts on multiple screen configurations, and much more.
  • Built-in support for Google Cloud Platform, making it easy to integrate Google Cloud Messaging and App Engine as server-side components.

Android Studio includes a powerful code editor, which supports smart editing, advanced code refactoring, and deep static code analysis.

Smart editing includes inline resource lookups that make it easier to read your code. Code refactoring allows you to transform your code across the scope of the entire project.

Static code analysis helps you identify bugs quickly. On top of the hundreds of code inspections that IntelliJ IDEA provides, Google have added custom inspections. For example,  metadata to the Android APIs, that flag which methods can return null and which can’t, which constants are allowed for which methods, and so on. Android Studio uses that data to analyze your code and find potential errors.

Be aware that Android Studio is currently available as an early access preview. Several features are either incomplete or not yet implemented and you may encounter bugs. If you are not comfortable using an unfinished product, you may want to instead download (or continue to use) the ADT Bundle (Eclipse with the ADT Plugin).

Instructions for downloading the latest version of Android Studio are available here: http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing/studio.html. Versions are available for download on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.