Managing app builds

[David]

We are developing our mobile app and would like suggestions on best practices to manage our mobile development builds.  We need the ability to isolate app builds for each of our environments.  For example, our dev app build will have continuous new work items by our developers.  Our staging build will contain items ready for our QA team to test.  Our production build will have release items.

Currently, the challenge we run into is after a publish to the telerik app store and users perform a livesync, the device will receive the latest published version.  Ultimately, the solution we are seeking is to publish to a specific environment without affecting the other ones.  Is there a way to keep different versions of the same app (e.g. AppDev, AppStage, AppProd)?

[Martin Yankov]

Hello David,

The AppManager Livesync updates are connected to an app and a version. The best solution to your problem would be to have three different apps in the Telerik AppManager store - one for each environment. Apps are differentiated through their Application Identifier (you can find it in the Properties section of your project). Here is an example workflow:

1. During development you work on an app with an app id like 'com.domain.yourapp.dev'. It's best to change the name to 'Your App Dev', for example. You publish it to Telerik AppManager and distribute it as your dev environment test. You can then publish AppManager Livesync updates.

2. Once you think this is ready for QA testing, change the app id to 'com.domain.yourapp.test' and have the name as 'Your App Test'. Publish it to Telerik AppManager - it will appear as a new app there. You can then distribute this app to your QAs and publish Livesync updates to it.

3. Once the QAs have tested this, you can build and publish the app with the final app id and version, 'com.domain.yourapp'.

Note, that Livesync updates will be published with regards to the app id and version at the time of publishing. This means that you can change the app id back to 'com.domain.yourapp.dev', set the appropriate version and publish Livesync updates to the dev version again.

Also, this workflow works best with a version control service like Git, so that you can get back to the code on your Test environment easily.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Regards,
Martin Yankov
Telerik