Manage Development and Production Builds

For starters, some of you may be wondering why you should use two builds while developing your app. The reason is because as you continue to build new features, you want to separate the development version from the existing public production app. Standard software development practice is to use different environments for the different versions of the software. The development version of an app typically uses a different database and server from the production environment. Developers commonly use dummy images or data during testing. In testing or development environments, it’s not uncommon for one to use test data such as “test comment”, “argharghargh” and “one more test comment”. Obviously, you don’t want your real users to see this kind of messages. In the case, if your app using an analytics system, you may even send thousands of events during the testing stage. Again, you don’t want to mix the test data with the production data in the same database. This is why it’s always recommended to separate the development and production builds.

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