The first time I tried to ship an app on Apple’s Testflight a few years ago, I found the process to be incredibly frustrating. That first time, I eventually abandoned the exercise. To make the deadline, I “shipped” the app by sharing my password to my Expo account to the first few beta testers (not recommended in the slightest).

The first time I successfully shipped an app on Testflight, I found the process to be magical. I rode a high of letting Apple handle my beta process and alerting users to download the application.

Fifty Testflight versions and more than 200 beta testers later, I find myself feeling frustrated with Testflight again and searching for other options. 96% of our beta testers had never used Testflight before, and found the process of downloading an app to download an app to be incredibly complicated. It didn’t help that when a user received the invitation link in their email, the link would only download Testflight – not automatically download our application too. After the first dozen of these new Testflight users complained that our app was broken, we began sending our own “onboarding” email explaining that they had to click the link twice.

Ideally, Testflight invitations shouldn’t require an additional email from our company. We couldn’t control the invitation links or emails, yet our users had the impression that our app was broken – before they had even downloaded our app.

Another big problem was the inherent lack of virality allowed by Testflight. Users couldn’t invite their friends to the beta in an easy or obvious fashion. Virality is critical to our social media application: we are built on like-minded people bonding over shared interests.

I have other nitpicks as well, like submitting new versions on web – not on the Connect phone app – requires you to ask users to “test” something. 90% of the new versions I push are bug fixes or design retouches, not brand new features in need of testing. I am usually at a loss of what to write at this step.

Still, this is a tiny nitpicks in comparison to my earlier complaints. Because of those frictions, we decided to publish our app to the App Store earlier than we would have.

Shipping to the App Store requires hurdling several technical obstacles. These include: having a ‘Sign in with your Apple ID’ option, iPad compatibility, and the ability for users to report and block other users and user generated content. Although perhaps not technically challenging projects, they required quite a bit of time to research and link together. We decided it was easier to pursue this option, given that we did want to launch at the end of Q2 anyway, despite it being significantly…annoying.