Do you know how to release your mobile app?

Now, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a startup doing it on your own or you’re just trying to launch a new product within an existing organisation you both have the same goals. Develop a great app and get it in front of your users. 

Websites and web-based systems are simpler. You can be very crude and just push changes to the live server or get more complicated with different deployment strategies which will require a developer and they can build in pipelines to do testing and make it seamless and automated.  

However, when you’re making mobile apps, you have to get them out onto the app store somehow otherwise your users. That’s how people get apps. You don’t want to subscribe every user to a beta platform and manually inform them of updates and push out the apps to them every single time you make a change. It just becomes a headache, in the long run, trying to maintain that user base and getting them to use the app.

There are 2 ways of getting your apps to app stores. 

• Public release -- When you’re making a general use app
• Private release -- When you’re making an internal app for a business 

Depending on what type of app you’re making the decision is usually made for you. However, you can release a public app through the private channel initially then move it to the public store. 

The private release will require that you run your own “Enterprise App Store”. This is a website that allows your users to access the app files. You would have it hosted on your intranet or a private website. The users would log in, download the files and then start using the app. 

A Public release involves submitting your app to The Play Store or the iTunes Store. Both of these processes include a quality assurance step from Apple and Google. These scans and checks look for malicious code, implementations that break guidelines or mislead users.  

When you do your public release you get some extra benefits as compared to your private rollout. 

The stores provide automatic updates to all your users. If you’re doing an Enterprise release you need to notify all of the users yourself that updates have happened. It’s a much more streamlined process and won’t require you to contact your users and notify them of a download and then maintain a separate website where they can access it.

We won’t write up a complete guide on how to get your apps to the app store, there are thousands of those on the internet but here are the pages from Apple and Google if you want to read more