Now first things first. Before you do any sort of paid advertising please please test your app just to 1
make sure that there's no bugs, there's no issues, there's no broken features. 2
Because otherwise this is what you're paying for. You're paying for bad reviews and bad ratings. 3
And even though everyone's star rating hurts and every bad review hurts, it will hurt even more when 4
you realize that you paid for those users in order to hate on you. 5
So don't let this happen. 6
Instead, make sure that you test your app thoroughly. 7
Now that includes giving it to your friends and family 8
but then what do you do once you run out of family and friends? 9
Well there's a lot of services that you can use. If you are developing an Android app there's a really good 10
service I would recommend 11
and they have a free tier as well and it's called Monkop. And it basically allows you to upload your 12
Android apk into- onto their servers and it will automatically test your app on various devices, 13
various screen sizes and checks for any bugs or crashes. 14
And it gives you a nice little report telling you what you need to fix and what are some of the issues 15
with your app. 16
Now they are yet to support iOS and currently in terms of testing on iOS 17
there are a few tools but they all require a little bit of coding knowledge. 18
So an alternative and probably better way of getting your app tested is by using real people. 19
So there's a company called User Testing that hires professional quality assurance or QA testers to look through 20
your app and give you a recording of their impressions, of their thoughts, of any bug,s any issues, any 21
feature requests etc. 22
So you'll get a lot more insight than purely just bug crash reporting. 23
So that's another website to explore. But just make sure essentially that you have tested your app to 24
death and you know that it will perform as you expect it to on most of the common iOS versions or Android 25
versions or the different phones. 26
Now another way of getting feedback on your app is using a website called PreApps. 27
So here, you can sign up for free and you can put up the app icon screenshots and description for your 28
app and the user base of this website will try and be helpful and give you feedback. 29
So essentially this is a platform where beta apps go in order to test their copywriting or test their icons 30
on real users. 31
And this is also a great platform where you can recruit beta testers for your app. 32
So instead of paying people through user testing, the idea is that you can gather users who are early 33
adopters to get your app for free and test it out for you. 34
Now another way that you can be to test for free is a bit of a hack. 35
So the idea is that when you launch your app onto the Apple App Store or onto the Google app store, you 36
have a choice between launching your app simultaneously to across the world, 37
so all app stores in the world, or you can tick to only launch to certain countries. 38
And one of the things that we tend to do is that for the first three months of our app launches, we tend 39
to only release it to New Zealand and Canada. 40
And the reason for that is because even though those countries have smaller numbers of users than our 41
main target audience which is the UK and US, but at the same time the users in New Zealand and Canada will 42
share a lot of the same demographics as our target audience and also we'll share similar culture, similar 43
sense of humor, similar appreciation of design. 44
And that means that we can iron out any issues before we launch to our target audience because if you 45
can be sure that the audience in New Zealand or Canada love your app and that you've resolved any issues 46
for those users, once you've made those users happy then if you launched to the rest of the world or 47
if you launched to your target audience, you have a much higher chance of getting it right the first 48
time. 49
So this is just a cool way of essentially beta testing for free.