
Beta Family: 50k Users to Test Your App - mcone
https://betafamily.com/
======
mephitix
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](http://erlibird.com) and
[http://playtestcloud.com](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.

~~~
mkilling
(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!

~~~
mephitix
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.

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

They've had no repeat customers?

~~~
jermaustin1
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.

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

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

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

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draugadrotten
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.

~~~
betafamily
Hi, we are lookig in to this.

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

~~~
mephitix
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.

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

~~~
mephitix
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.

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Operyl
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](https://betafamily.com/app/12089/feed-item/28330)

~~~
Raphmedia
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.

~~~
arkitaip
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.

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

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zerkten
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.

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nkkollaw
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/](https://www.reddit.com/r/alphaandbetausers/),
although it's not amazingly active.

~~~
adventured
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.

~~~
betafamily
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.

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covercash
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.

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0x0
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

~~~
warent
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

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

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greenwalls
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.

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le-mark
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.

~~~
rom16384
With [https://www.usertesting.com/](https://www.usertesting.com/) you can get
videos of users using your app and answer some questions. It's useful for
usability testing.

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duren
> 50,000 testers representing 207 nationalities

Wait, how many nationalities are there?

~~~
nfriedly
There's more than 200 countries listed on
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states](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.

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abol3z
My app is in Arabic language, do you have testers for Arabic?

