Best Practice: How to test your app

We know testing is really important

• It's critical to have your app fully tested and validated before your app could publish to the app store.
• it's also very important that you have a staging environment when you developing new features for your users and open it later.

So we offer two approaches

Set up another app for testing and developing only

You could create two apps, one for testing only, one for production only, see following steps to create your testing app.

• You could create another app use your staging environment params, such as App URL , redirect URL etc.
• Then, you could just use this app as your testing only app, you don't have to filling the full listings, cause testing app don't need to publish to app store.
• You can testing your app in "App testing" page to install your app in development store, and start testing your app.
  • If you don't have any development store, follow this guide to learn how to create a development store.
• After you‘ve fully developed and tested your app, you can just deploy your code to your production app environment, or specifically, to your production app's app url
• If your app haven't published to app store yet, just submit your production app for review, and your production code will start to use after your app is approved and published to app store.
• If your app already published to app store, then when you deploy your code to your production app environment, your code will start affecting your users immediately.

Use a feature flag to separate your testing environment

You don't have to create two apps, you can just use a feature flag to separate your testing environment.

• When your app haven't published to app store, don't worry, you don't need feature flag, because your changes will not affecting your users.
• But when your app is already published to app store, your changes will affecting your users immediately, you should use feature flag to separate your testing environment.
• You could setup a feature flag for a feature entrance, and this feature flag can open to the internal developers, that way your app could separate the testing environment only for the internal developers.
• After your feature flagged feature is ready to publish, you could just remove the feature flag and publish your new feature to all of your users.

That's two approaches to setup testing environment, we hope you could use this best practice to test your app.

If your app is not fully tested, and has fetal bug in it：

• If your app haven't published to app store, and submit for review, your app will not be published to app store.
• If your app is already published to store,  your app will be unpublished from app store.

Because if your app have fetal bugs, this will against our review rules, your app will not be able to published to store or your app will be unpublished from your store depend on your app status. checkout the app review rules to know more.