Any suggestion for publushing beta version of the app?

I have plans to publish my application I'm working on but I'm not sure about the best flow for Beta version. Maybe you have some experience and can suggest something?

I'm thinking about some landing page with described list of features with examples and some form, to subscribe for updates. That way I can find how many people are actually interesting in these features and it can motivate me to make it publically, but if not, then I can keep working on features and improvements.

After that, at some point when the app is ready I send some email, that you can sign in. I guess I will also need some feedback/reporting issue form and I'm pretty sure I forgot something.

P.S. What is the best way to sign in to the app for you? I was thinking about email + password, but I guess the better solution will be using some secured OAuth. As an example, currently I have Sign In using GitHub only. So, in DataBase I don't store any information like password, or email.

Comments

[Chen Asraf]

For my app I used Discord to generate discussions & feedback, as well as post regular/beta updates.

An email list would also be a good idea.

As for the sign in, I find that there are 3 types of users:

• Convenience seekers - they want to log in with the fastest way possible. If you only support GitHub that might be okay if you're truly a developer-centric app, otherwise, you might want to include Google/Apple sign in as well as they are really broadly used
• Don't like socials - some people truly avoid social logins at all costs if possible, your current email/password login might be a good fit for those
• Privacy enthusiasts - usually prefer a completely offline option if possible, or at the very least email/password with no domain/character restrictions

[Pavel Keyzik]

Wow... That's interesting! I should definetely be aware of that. Thank you! Now I really started thinking about offline. I had thoughts about it but didn't know if it'll be usefull, as in my app I will need sync between devices. But maybe for beta testing it's okay to test app without any sign in and store information locally. Altough, that way I won't know the user at all. Anyway, interesting case and thank you for your comment 👍

[Chen Asraf]

Of course every case has its own arguments, if your app relies on the syncing in principle, then you probably won't want to make a truly offline option. I wouldn't waste this time just for beta testing and not for production.

That said - my app has "data sync" as a major feature, but in principle, there is no need to sync it in the first place - unless I'm looking for easy backups, or as you said, multiple device sync.
So in my case I ended up adding offline support - as I had several users complaining about it.

But every app is its own case - consider whether your online-only approach is a necessity of the circumstances - is it too long to develop for now? That's okay. Or is online-sync a pillar of the concept of your app? Theoretically offline-only would make it useless? Then there might be no need for offline. In short, you should make these considerations based on the app itself.

[Pavel Keyzik]

You're totally right! Easy backup should be enough for now, as my data is pretty simple and .csv format will be the best way to do that. As far as I understand, my goal should be show people one version of the app and the basic idea of how it works, and if they say, that they want it, then I can start thinking about convienence like where to store data, how to sync between devices, and so on. That's actually a really good point and even based on feedback from you, I already started to think about a lot of things. What happens when it will be more users 😆 I guess my app will change a lot