[Interest] Android and iOS: how to easily handle 'staging' and 'production' versions ?

[Gian Maxera]

> On 17 May 2016, at 15:10, Jason H <jhihn at gmx.com> wrote:
> 
>> Hello all,
>> I often need to keep two version of the app: ‘production’ that it’s the current app live on the stores and ‘staging’ that it’s an app deployed only to the client and testers for the new upcoming release.
>> 
>> Of course, I don’t want to use the same package name for the apps, so let’s suppose I’d like to have: ‘com.mycompany.staging.coolapp’ for staging and ‘com.mycompany.coolapp’ for the one on stores.
>> 
>> For now, switching from one build to another build, it require my to manually change the java source directory tree, the java package name at the top of each java class declaration, the package name into AndroidManifest and Info.plist.
>> 
>> Do you find an automatic way to handle this switch of build environments easily ?
> 
> Don't to it that way. You'll have issues.
> 
> Just use source control as you are supposed to - a branch for each build if that is what you want. Or use tags.
> I don't do it that way because I only ever work on one code base at a time, each revision is put into a different build on the app store, using the build number. For iOS, this can reset every version, for android it must increase per the identifier. 
> 
> The app stores allow you to put an app into testing before release, use that feature don't re-invent the wheel and make it harder for yourself.

The app stores doesn’t allow to easily share a testing app with the client. Both stores they requires subscriptions as a kind of tester or developer. Neither works when you need to show the works done with a client that just need to see what you have done and sign off and pay the invoice.
In this case, I cannot use the testing features used by app stores … because, as I said, I have to give the possiblity to install both version on the same device but working on different environments.

I don’t want to re-invent the wheel … that’s why I’m asking if there is a solution out there that fits my needs… but it’s seem there isn’t :-(