What is the optimal way to allow beta users to invite friends

Question

Having an app in a beta store like TestFlight is great for getting feedback but some users ask for ways to invite their friends. The most basic way to do this is that the existing users provide me with their friends contact details, like an email address, when I gather feedback from them, but this disturbs the flow of invite by introducing a third party (namely me). Using Firebase and Swift, has anyone a suggestion how to set up the invite process in a better way? One approach might be a user-triggered action to send an email from within the app to their friend, with a link back to email me. Another approach might be to create a Firebase record with their friend's details, from which I could manually add these to TestFlight. This has an advantage of keeping a record of who is friends with who, which could be used elsewhere to provide updates on how their friend is progressing within the app, but the invites from TestFlight will look like spam to the invited user. Has anyone suggestions using these or other approaches?

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 30 '18 at 11:28

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You can use the Google form https://www.google.com/forms/about/ to make a simple form with e-mail.

You massively share with your friends.

Then you export and import to external test flight testers.

answered Mar 30 '18 at 11:28

Kibo

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score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 30 '18 at 12:01

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If you want to set up an invitation form to capture emails and allow forwarding with tracking then firebase is not the optimal way to go. Look into using a mail based form like mailchimp that can be triggered from an app and will collect the data you want.

answered Mar 30 '18 at 12:01

Zyntx

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That sounds interesting. So the workflow from the app would be something like USER_ACTION -> CALL_TO_MAILCHIMP -> MAIL_TO_FRIEND -> MAIL_TO_ME -> INVITE_THROUGH_TESTFLIGHT -> FRIEND_SIGNS_UP – Shane O'Seasnain Mar 30 '18 at 12:58
or like USER_ACTION -> CALL_TO_MAILCHIMP -> MAIL_TO_FRIEND -> FORMS TO COLLECT DATA (also creates an email db for future news, etc) -> INVITE_THROUGH_TESTFLIGHT -> FRIEND_SIGNS_UP – Zyntx Mar 30 '18 at 13:03

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 15 '18 at 14:11

TestFlight now allows you to send a public link to invite users to test your beta app.

If you combine that with Firebase Dynamic links, you can specify a Fallback URL when building your Firebase Dynamic link that Firebase will use when your app is not installed - you should provide this public TestFlight link as the parameter.

See here Firebase Invite for Beta App (Google Play Store Beta and iOS TestFlight)

You can also limit the number of testers that can use the public link to join the group.

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Sep 07 '18 at 14:52

I appreciate all of the answers above. The main conclusions are perhaps best combined:

that Firebase is not built to integrate promotions or referrals, outside of registered users. It would be a nice addition to have.
that curating mailing lists outside the backend is currently the best way to broadcast the readiness of an app for use, although this doesn't allow for extended sharing outside of my first-hand network

What is the optimal way to allow beta users to invite friends

4 Answers4