Once you're satisfied with your application and
with how it works, it's time to properly test it. It's wise to frequently test your application throughout
the development process. It's a good habit to develop
and even when working on larger projects where
other engineers may have the specific
testing job, you should still take
ownership to test your work. Once all the features are
integrated to your application, it's important to test the
overall flow and functionality of your application to ensure everything
works as it should. For testing purposes, you can
use the embedded simulator, which comes with the
Xcode application, but it would be even better
to test with real devices. A simulator will not support some functionalities
that need to be tested, such as Bluetooth
connectivity if you need to pair your
application to a device, or if you need to use augmented reality features with
your device's camera. Also, some of the UI elements
can behave differently on simulators as opposed to the actual device that
it was designed for. Another point to consider
is testing your app on multiple devices and by a
larger number of people, small testing samples
can miss out on some of the potential issues
with your application. So it is always better to
share the application with multiple people in order to get as much
feedback as possible. Sharing and distributing
your application can be an issue, but because of that, you have multiple
options to easily distribute your application
with friends or testers. TestFlight is one very
common option for this, TestFlight makes distribution
of your applications simpler and tracks who's testing the application and
their reported issues. TestFlight is free
for developers with an Apple Developer
Program account. One of TestFlight's
features is that released builds will
stay active for 90 days, which will give your testers enough time to test
the application in detail and report any
issues they encounter. Another benefit of
using TestFlight is the number of testers you
can have on your platform. TestFlight limits you to up to 100 internal testers and up to 10,000 external testers
by sharing a public link. Before uploading your
application to TestFlight, make sure you have assigning team and correct
credentials selected under the signing and capabilities section of
your application target. All in all, it is a vital
importance to extensively test your application before submitting it to
the iOS App Store. By doing so, you will make sure there are no bugs
which will result in a better user experience
for the users and you will have a shorter time waiting for Apple
support's review.