How We Tested iOS 12 Beta
Article Summary
Kateryna Sprynsian from Bumble's QA team shares a hard truth: when iOS 12 dropped, 60% of their users updated within weeks. Were they ready?
The Bumble/Badoo QA team walks through their complete iOS beta testing strategy, from deciding when to start (beta 6, not beta 1) to the specific bugs they caught before millions of users were affected. This is their manual testing playbook for major OS releases.
Key Takeaways
- Started testing at beta 6: early betas too unstable, most Apple bugs fixed by then
- Tested with both old Xcode 9 and new Xcode 10 builds (different bugs appear)
- Found crashes on launch, freezes with third party accounts, broken notification layouts
- CPU, memory, and battery usage showed no significant impact between iOS 11 and 12
- User adoption jumped from 1% in August to 60% by October (previous year data)
Testing iOS betas caught critical crashes and UI bugs before 60% of users upgraded in just two months, protecting millions from a broken app experience.
About This Article
Badoo found an Objective-C enum initialization crash in iOS 12.0 when users tried to open their own profile. The issue came from a runtime mismatch in how the switch statement evaluated invalid rawValues.
Kateryna Sprynsian's team used Xcode Instruments to profile CPU, memory, and energy consumption. They compared performance metrics between iOS 11 and iOS 12 Beta to track down what was causing the problem.
The developers patched the enum bug before iOS 12 officially launched. This kept the app stable as 60% of users upgraded within two months of the new OS release.