Next week, I shall—at long last—be submitting Scrivener for iOS to Apple’s TestFlight beta-testing program. It has spent the past month in alpha-testing in-house (I am writing this blog post in Scrivener on my brand new iPad Pro 9.7”, in fact), and we’re now ready to open up testing to a slightly larger group. We’ve had a lot of users emailing us asking if they can beta-test, so in order to be entirely open, I thought I’d explain how we are going to approach the beta-testing process.

We’re going to run the beta in two rounds. For this first round of testing, we’re using a private group of testers on an invite-only basis. That sounds a bit clique-y, but actually there’s no favouritism or secrecy in how this group is selected: we’re always on the lookout for users on our forums, social media pages and through our tech support channels who seem particularly good at finding and reporting bugs (perhaps because they are very patient when tracking down a gnarly issue or because they are good at communicating problems—or maybe they're just good at breaking things). We ask such users to help with early betas of our software when needed (I’m sure there are many, many users we have missed, though). These are our Guinea pigs, in other words, and we know that they won’t shout at us when their work blows up because of a typo with a semicolon on line 956 of the Dropbox syncing code.

After the initial round of beta-testing with the closed group, once we’re happy there are no obviously nasty data-loss or sync bugs that might cause issues for a larger group, we will throw the doors open, make the beta public, and ask for volunteers. We won’t be able to accept everyone, because there’s a limit to how many users we can add as beta-testers via Apple’s TestFlight program, but all of those of you who have been so enthusiastic about getting your hands on it will be able to put your name in the virtual hat. We’ll put up a form on our site where anyone can apply, and we’ll provide information about what you will need in order to be a beta-tester (which mainly just comes down to patience and being prepared to come across and report bugs). I’ll post information about that here, on the forums, and via our social media sites, when the time comes.