Beta Family: 50k Users to Test Your App | Hacker News Reader

Beta Family: 50k Users to Test Your App

betafamily.com

150 pointsmcone40 comments

Lot of comments putting this service down - but I love it. I used them for a beta launch. Got ~180 people who applied for it. Got a ton of honest feedback that helped me plan for my next beta round.

The actual website is a bit slow and not so intuitive, but has a bunch of features. Support is great.

Having people put in their device UDIDs makes the process faster to register in the Apple dev portal.

There are other services I'm planning to try out, like http://erlibird.com and http://playtestcloud.com. PlayTestCloud will record audio (maybe video?) of people trying out your app/game. I imagine it depends on the capabilities of the device OS though.

(PlaytestCloud co-founder)

We record the players' screens (with their permission) in iOS, Android and browser games.

We offer a free trial - would love for you to try it out and let us know what you think!

Thanks - I already reached out. I'm excited to try it out for another game in Sept! Your support team has already been very helpful.

From the page: "6 000 tests completed, trusted by 6 000 companies..."

They've had no repeat customers?

I want this answered. How have only 6000 tests been completed with 6000 customers? Even if a single customer ran just two tests, the numbers wouldn't match.

This leads me to believe both numbers are fake.

Or accidental variable reuse in a template. Could be either.

In this case they forget to use their own service for test.

yeah! We do need to test our service better ;)

Hi! The numbers are out of date, we need to update them. The real number is about 3x bigger...

Maybe they rounded?

Clicked on available tests, found a listing for "funimate pro lip sync"

Lip sync sounds like fun so I clicked. Was immediately presented with a test but not what I expected. Instead of a lip sync video maker, it was for a "Bitcoin Price Tracker ACrypto - Test is looking for testers. Part of the Funimate Pro Version lip sync music video maker testing family"

My trust evaporated right there.

Hi, we are lookig in to this.

I have used this service, does not work as advertised. We hardly got 2-3 testers to test our App.

What was your reward value?

I'm guessing you didn't put up a reward. I put just a $5 reward per tester and got ~100 testers who applied within 2 weeks.

Do you have to provide the reward to every tester, or do they apply and you pick the ones you want?

Once you create the test, you can open it up for applications. You can also search based on the demographic you want (age range, geographic, etc.) and invite users yourself.

If people apply, you can pick from those. I invited about 60 testers and had ~180 others apply. I was able to pick from that 180 set - and the reward goes only to them.

Also, before you start the test, you buy 'Beta' credits. You can choose to use these however you want, for example if you buy 50 beta credits, you can give a $5 reward to 10 testers, or a $10 reward to 5 testers. You can buy more credits as you go if you want to offer rewards to more testers.

Interesting that it's a device enrollment, but also a tad scary. There seems to be a lot of trust that you want your testers to give, and there was basically no heads up to the user.

EDIT: I see what they're doing now, crafty, it doesn't actually install any profiles in the end they're just capturing your UDID instead of entering it manually.

EDIT 2: Nice, I was expecting survey spam: https://betafamily.com/app/12089/feed-item/28330

I hate to be that person but in the requirements of that link, is "Requirements [...] Male & Female" really needed? How is this a requirement? This would be better written as "No gender requirement" or simply removing that line unless only one gender is specified.

There's also the 13-99 age requirement for, you know, when you are ignorant to believe that your market really is everyone between 13 and 99.

Seems to be going well for the people asking testers to fill out their paid surveys lol.

This looks like an interesting site. The immediate focus is towards the developer of the apps. I wonder if it'd be more successful if the initial site focus was on the apps (read: opportunities) listed under Browse Tests. Getting a bigger base of people who like to test stuff apps would seem like a pretty valuable thing and I had to think for a few moments about how I can be on the other side. Maybe a less persistent person would have browsed away.

Really cool design.

There are a few of these services, but I always wonder how engaged are the testers.

I would assume most of them don't really care about trying your app. I'd then much rather post it on https://www.reddit.com/r/alphaandbetausers/, although it's not amazingly active.

In the end of course, nothing will ever properly replace real users that actually care about your product. There's nothing Beta Family can ever do to match that. A service that is serious about improving, will focus on actual users that want to use the product because it meets a need.

Any attempt to automate away that hard, required process of business improvement, must necessarily result in a hollow outcome.

I think one way to get people who are genuinely interested would be for you to build a mailing list.

I always got good users from Beta List.

We do agree that your own "fans" are highly important. That is why we encourage app companies to combine their own fans with the testers of our community.

Thanks!

We do have a lot of highly engaged testers: https://betafamily.com/toplist

I've had a similar idea to this in the past, not only to test but also to seed apps with some initial users. My incentive to get users signed up is reserved usernames. I want covercash as my first choice username for EVERY new app/service. I'm still pissed I slept on Instagram for too long.

Give me first crack at my username on all new apps and I'll kick the tires for them.

Interesting that they list "iTunes Connect internal testflight" as a supported distribution method (in addition to external testflight). That must surely be against some kind of terms of service and developer agreement. Also, it's a pretty bad idea either way because you would have to grant the testers access to your iTunesConnect. :O

That's not true. Testflight is clunky but secure and gets the job done. You just enter in the email addresses of people you want to receive a test version, and those people need the Testflight app to use it. IIRC You can even control which users are distributed which version

Out of curiosity, have you personally used Testflight? Maybe it's changed since I last did

That's how TF works right now. Not sure where the parent's complaints come from.

Note the difference between testflight internal and testflight external.

I tried this with an Android app and it went well for us. The only problem was that the UI was super slow in Firefox, but it worked well in Chrome. That was several months ago so hopefully they fixed it by now.

I would definitely use a service like this. The last time a launched a side project I found it extremely difficult to engage users, even users that had signed up with an email. They simply wouldn't respond to anything; feedback requests, surveys, nothing. I took this as a strong signal there was no market or that I'd done something horribly wrong in the implementation. If I could've just paid $X to get some honest feedback, would have saved me a lot of time.

With https://www.usertesting.com/ you can get videos of users using your app and answer some questions. It's useful for usability testing.

> 50,000 testers representing 207 nationalities

Wait, how many nationalities are there?

https://www.quora.com/How-many-nationalities-are-there-in-th...

There's more than 200 countries listed on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states (I didn't actually count them, but jQuery says the table has 238 rows; a few of these are headers/footers, but there's still enough to have more than 207.) That isn't exactly equal to a nationality, but it's probably a good minimum - I could easily believe that there are more than 207 nationalities.

the un has 193 members and there are still 54 countries that aren't a member of the un, so, it might be possible that they have that many nationalities, but I doubt that this is untrue.

My app is in Arabic language, do you have testers for Arabic?

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