Hi everyone!
I'm writing to let everyone know that we've updated our internal "pre-release" announcement process for the CommCare mobile client to now be accessible on this forum, and explain how to take part if it's of value to you or your organization.
What's a pre-release and why would I want to know about them?
On a regular basis during our development process, we finalize what major features and changes will make it into a mobile release, and then "fork" over the app to begin full QA. After this point we only make changes to the release to fix bugs or correct invalid behavior.
After we've cut the release for QA, we announce that pre-released version and make the APK we are testing available externally. You can use that APK to test upcoming features, or to make sure that your specific application doesn't have any incompatibilities or bugs with the new version of the mobile app before it is live on the Play Store and automatically rolled out to users.
What if I discover a bug in the pre-release version?
If your app experiences a bug or crash that you can verify occurs on the pre-release version, but not on the latest version available from the Google Play store, please submit the bug through HQ as usual, and note that it only occurs on the pre-release.
How do I sign up to hear about pre-releases?
You can either subscribe to the specific pre-release category in the CommCare forum here:
or you can subscribe to the more broad Platform Announce category of the forum here:
where we'll be expanding other types of announcements in the future which may be relevant to people who are relying on the platform. Note that you won't need to subscribe to those categories to get important services updates, like downtime notifications or issues with your project space, but may find them useful to track upcoming changes or additions to CommCare.
Cheers,
-Clayton