Over the past few years, mobile platform is emerging and corporate focus is accelerating towards mobility as key business. If we cast our memories back a few years, mobile apps were often meant for market presence for companies, but today they are a fiercely-competitive world of money-making businesses. Hence it’s important to consider every aspect of your application: from design and usability, to performance and stability. Numerous practices are followed during application development lifecycle, to make sure the app is good enough to reach market. Some of the key practices include lively user experience, adequate design, adhering platform guidelines/policies and thorough testing. Beta Testing and its Importance Above all the important success factors, we will taper the context of discussion to application testing. Testing (verification and validation) is one of the most integral part of the application development lifecycle, considering that error free software will be delivered to users. During the process of verification and validation there are several phases like alpha, beta tests being conducted with internal testers and external beta users. Beta testing helps you take those aforementioned considerations into account, and address. Choosing the right Beta Distribution Platform As there are numerous tools available, each that claim to be more useful than the other, it’s important to consider the following criteria.

1. Enterprise app store: Ability to create your own private app store and restrict access to external users
2. User and test group management
3. Ability for beta users to download app easily and provide their feedback
4. SDK for integration with the apps in beta environment
5. Multiple app stores, multiple groups and ability to publish multiple applications
6. Easy app distributions: over-air and support for tester apps
7. Device management: list and control users and devices who have access to apps
8. Notifying users of new versions
9. Crash reports (symbolication)
10. Support for Continuous Integration (CI) tools like Bamboo, Jenkins, etc.
11. And most importantly, a reasonable price

Beta Testing in Android Platform Testing the application and getting feedback from users is never easy in mobile application development lifecycle. Each mobile platform follows certain steps to build and distribution process. Normally the build and distribution process differs from platform to platform. Here we discuss Android specific beta testing and distribution tool. There are various platforms in the market providing solutions for distributing and managing the beta testing workflow. Some major ones are.

1. TestFlight (Suspended Support for Android)
2. TestFairy
3. AppBlade
4. HockeyApp
5. Google Play Native App Beta Testing