Apple adds beta support to App Store, Minecraft PE betas may come to iOS in the future

Every time a beta release for Minecraft Pocket Edition is released, countless iPhone users ask why they don’t get the beta builds. There are two primary reasons for a lack of PE betas on iOS, the first being it’s incredibly difficult, and the other is because it’s unnecessary. It’s difficult because among other requirements, Apple requires the developers running the beta test to manually enter every Device ID that will receive the beta. Mojang developers don’t have the time to enter thousands of Device IDs into their beta program. It’s unnecessary because testing applications on iOS requires only testing it on the few iPhones, iPads, and iPods that can run it. By comparison, there are thousands of Android devices that could have bugs with MCPE.

We wrote back in Febuary about Apple buying Burstly, a company that developed TestFlight. TestFlight was a service that made beta testing on iOS easier by going around the App Store. Today at their WWDC Keynote in California, Apple announced that TestFlight Functionality would be integrated into the App Store in iOS 8.

Keep in mind that even though beta testing is now possible, it doesn't mean Mojang will use it for Minecraft PE. It is still up to Mojang to decide if they want to provide beta testing for iOS or not. In addition, it's not clear when TestFlight will be available to developers. And Mojang won't use it for the upcoming 0.9.0 betas.

(thanks TechCrunch for the picture)

Source: TechCrunch

UPDATE: Tomasso has confirmed that the betas will not be coming to iOS 8, due to beta tests only supporting up to 1,000 members. For comparison, the 0.8.0 beta test on Android passed 10,000 members.