Apple announced TestFlight Groups, a new feature aimed at making it easier to manage groups of beta users in TestFlight. On the same day, Apple also announced that the App Store is now accepting larger binaries.
As Apple stated in their announcement, TestFlight Groups allows to "organize your testers into groups to quickly send builds, provide separate instructions on where to focus, and apply an action to several testers at once in TestFlight."
Registered developers can access the new feature through the "User and Roles" section in iTunesConnect. As InfoQ verified on iTunesConnect, only external testers can be assigned to a group; furthermore, a tester can belong to more than one group. Groups behave like a tag that can be assigned to testers in order to be able to retrieve them collectively when inviting testers to a beta. This is a huge improvement over managing testers one by one, especially given that TestFlight allows to invite up to 1,000 testers and entirely manual operations can easily become cumbersome.
TestFlight Groups replace legacy distribution lists that were provided by the original TestFlightApp.com service that Apple acquired in 2014. It is worth to remember here that the legacy TestFlightApp.com will no longer be available starting at the end of this month.
As Darrell Etherington remarks on Tech Crunch, "being able to issue separate instructions also means that developers using the platform can use multiple groups of testers to focus on separate new features and provide feedback specific to each."
As mentioned, Apple also announced that "the size limit of an app package submitted through iTunes Connect has increased from 2 GB to 4 GB, so you can include more media in your submission." This change, Apple makes explicit, does not affect the cellular network delivery size limit, which remains set at 100 MB.
