Previous to TestFlight, life was ridiculously painful for an iPhone developer to beta test apps. I wish they'd charge me, it's that good. I'd probably pay at least $100 a month.

I've heard a lot of praise for Testflight, and now we have people proclaiming "I wish they'd charge me". What's the catch - or put in a better way, what's their business model?

Gathering device UDIDs and offering beta testers on a platter to those that pay.

They have a large amount of funding from groups that should point you in the direction of where they may go.

My guess is an eventual business model is for advertisers (the true customers) to get user information from developers who opt-in. Getting a mass-load of app developers, each with their own end users, into your ecosystem provides a lot of data to sell.

These guys are killing it. Going to bake this in to my next test release of GetCloak for iOS.

One feature I'm particularly jazzed about is the logging capture support. It is so painful to explain to test users how to capture logs on iOS!

Can this be used in a release distribution app or only beta test ad hoc apps? It sounds like it's only for test distribution, which is cool, but reporting on distribution apps would be nice.

I'd be very interested to know this as well.

I'm yet to use their framework, but am going to integrate it into my next project and these reporting features look very attractive from a production perspective - and for free!

Does anybody know their business model? It's such a good idea but I have no idea how it wouldn't be making massive losses.

There was some sort of announcement (that I can't seem to find) that it is free for developers and that they plan on charging for some sort of enterprise version.

This blurb on TC briefly mentions a little bit about it: http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/20/testflight/

I've been using the beta since it was first released and I've never seen any data for released apps, though I suspect it wouldn't be difficult. I haven't looked in to why it only work in Ad Hoc builds. I agree it would be awesome if only to get crash reports and console logs back through TestFlight.

Apple forbid data gathering without user consent, but I think as long as you prompt on start up it should be OK.

Huge fan of the TestFlight App, helps me test out lots of startups' products. Also a huge help to the startups themselves and I think the SDK will be another great step.

I've just installed this in an app I'm working on. It's amazing stuff. I don't know how they continue to offer all this for free. Waiting to be bought by Apple perhaps?

I've been using it since the first beta and it's a huge help especially when working with beta testers who aren't tech savvy enough to send back crash reports or to clearly explain what they're doing when they experience issues.

This product is so amazing that it makes iOS provisioning and ad hoc distribution look professional, and that's saying a lot. Huge fan of this service.

So awesome. Used them during our beta testing too and it was seamless.

TestFlight are doing excellent work - congrats guys!

What's the catch?