App Store Connect usability issues

Allow me to be the Nth person to complain about App Store Connect’s lack of transparency, I’m currently working on an app for radiospiral.net’s net radio station, and I’m doing my proper dilligence by getting it beta tested by internal testers before pushing it to the App Store. I’m using TestFlight to keep it as simple as possible (and because fastlane seems to work well with that setup).

I managed to get two testers in play, but I was trying to add a third today and I could not get the third person to show up as an internal tester because I kept missing a step. Here’s how it went, with my mental model in brackets:

• Go to the users and groups page and add the new user. [okay, the new user’s available now].
• Add them to the same groups as the other tester who I got working. [right, all set up the same…]
• Added the app explicitly to the tester. […and they’ve got the app]
• Mail went out to the new tester. [cool, the site thinks they should be a tester] [WRONG]
• Tester installs Testflight and taps the link on their device. Nothing appreciable happens. [Did I set them up wrong?]
• Delete the user, add them again. [I’ll set them up again and double-check…yes, they match]
• They tap again. Still nothing. [what? but…]
• Go over to the Testflight tab and look at the list of testers. Still not there. [I added them. why are they not there?] [also wrong]

Much Googling and poking about got me nothing at all. Why is the user I added as an internal tester not there? They should be in the list.

I went back to the page and this time I saw the little blue plus in a circle. I have to add them here too! Clicked the +, and the new user was there, waiting to be added to the internal testers.

Sigh.

So now I have blogged this so I can remember the process, and hopefully someone else who’s flailing around trying to figure out why internal testers aren’t showing up on the testers list will find this.