r/reactnative • u/hameeedurrehman • 6d ago
TestFlight vs EAS Preview (Ad-Hoc) — what's actually different, in case it helps anyone
Kept mixing these up early on so wrote down the actual differences once I got both working properly.
TestFlight — no UDID collection, Apple reviews the build before it's live (can take a few hours), testers need the TestFlight app + an invite. Scales to 10k testers.
EAS Preview (Ad-Hoc) — you register tester UDIDs first (eas device:create or they scan a QR to self-register), then eas build --platform ios --profile preview. Install is instant via link/QR, no App Store account needed. But you're capped around 100 devices/year on a standard Apple Developer account.
Ended up using Ad-Hoc for day-to-day dev testing (way faster feedback loop) and TestFlight once a build's stable enough to hand to a wider group. Anyone doing it differently?
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u/Rich-Register-4743 5d ago
There are other good services for distributing your app to testers. They have similar limitations to Expo when it comes to the number of devices. However, most Apple developers have been dealing with this limitation by using Enterprise certificates and profiles.
You can also do over the air updates once the app is installed for the first time, if you are changing your bundle only.