Those of us with iPhone apps (released or unreleased) are able to send out limited beta builds using ad-hoc distribution. While the Apple docs for this have a few holes in them, there are a number of blogs, postings and other articles out there on ‘the net’ that fill the gaps.
However, one thing I haven’t seen anyone mention, and I was curious about: When you do a beta build do you use the same app id as your released (or to-be-released) app?
The argument for using a different id is that the beta could then still run alongside the released app. This is probably more important if you already have a released version in the field.
An argument against is that the beta would not have access to any data the released app may have generated, and vice -versa. This may or may not be what you want on a case-by-case basis.
Are there any issues with this approach? I only have one app id registered currently, but IIRC there are no obstacles to just creating more as necessary..?
Would be interested to hear what others are doing.
We use the same app ID, just for simplicity. There are enough headaches in ad-hoc distribution that we don’t want to confuse anybody with ‘why are there two apps on my phone?’ problems.