Over the past few months, I recruited and trained a small team of testers, developed internal testing tools, and worked with a handful of startups who are piloting our service. The service is now open for beta -- I would love to hear feedback from hackers and startups on HN who can give it a shot.
It seems like a user should have at least some idea of what the app is. For example, I'll read the first couple sentences of an app's description and look at some screenshots/video before I decide to download it. This might be something you want to consider instead of having absolutely no idea what the app is before running it, since I assume most users have at least some context when opening an app.
Also, do you have any terms, in particular, regarding confidentiality?
If you add a 'proxy layer' to your solution, that would be awesome. To explain the scenario, it is really very valuable for us app startups to see how it behaves in China, in India, in Europe, in US etc. You may keep your current system intact, and 'if' the customer desires so, you can route your connection over those proxies(from real ISS'es) from all over the world and test it 'as if...' This is really important and not so hard to implement... But sometimes, you can catch bugs and usability horrors with slow or dropped connection or some weird proxy mambo jambo played by ISS providers.
Also, would be very interested to know if you have plans as to how (or if) you will overcome the issues you would have if you wanted to scale such a bespoke service?
Well, I hope we can send our more non-gameish apps :)
Definitely going to consider this for future testing :)
It's saved me a lot of money that otherwise would've wasted on scammy, buggy, "not-working-as-advertised" apps. If you're a developer (i.e., can sign apps and load them unto your device), give InstaSign a try.
They're probably using a similar method (as they seemingly test on iPad/iPhone, retina/non-retina, iOS5/6 devices and it might be a bit more work for you to add at least 6 new UDIDs).
