TestFlight

TestFlight is how iOS apps reach testers before the App Store. You upload a build to App Store Connect, invite people, and they install it through Apple’s TestFlight app. It is the iOS counterpart of Google Play’s testing tracks.

There are two kinds of tester:

• Internal testers are members of your App Store Connect team, up to 100. Builds reach them as soon as processing finishes, with no review.
• External testers are anyone else, up to 10,000, invited by email or through a public link. The first build of each version goes through a lighter Beta App Review before they can install it.

Builds expire 90 days after upload, so a long-running beta needs fresh uploads.

What makes TestFlight valuable for React Native teams is that the build is the real thing: release-signed, with the JavaScript bundled into the app, not loaded from Metro. It is where you catch problems that only appear in a release build, such as a missing environment variable or a crash on startup that debug builds hide.

Common surprises:

• TestFlight builds use Apple’s production push notification environment. A backend still sending to the sandbox environment makes notifications silently fail in TestFlight even though they worked in development.
• Testers report feedback and screenshots from inside the TestFlight app, and crash reports appear in App Store Connect and Xcode’s Organizer.
• Uploading with EAS Submit or fastlane still needs a unique build number every time.

For quick internal builds that do not need Apple processing at all, an ad hoc or internal-distribution development build is often faster; use TestFlight when you want the build your users will actually get.