Amazon has provided a new tool to allow developers to test their apps with a select group before their products are fully released on the Appstore.

The Live App Testing tool allows developers to distribute apps for Android and Amazon Fire devices to a pre-defined set of testers who can determine how apps work in conjunction with various Amazon services, such as in-app purchasing.

Developers can use this feedback to improve quality, stability and the user experience before pushing their products live for download. Developers invite testers by emailing them with a link to download the test version of the app.

In a post on the Amazon developer blog, the company’s Paul Cutsinger said in-house testing with side-loaded apps is fine for isolating and fixing bugs, but testing apps against a production environment is needed to determine whether consumers are getting the experience intended.

Amazon has been providing A/B testing for Fire OS, Android and iOS for some time. However, this is for apps that have already been launched.

A/B testing allows developers to try out different features or versions of apps on different subsets of users without the need to write client-side code or redeploy the app. They can measure and identify which approaches are most effective in terms of usage and monetisation.

The company also provides an Analytics Dashboard which provides developers with metrics on daily and monthly active devices, total sessions, retention rates, average revenue per device and average revenue per paying device for in-app items.