One of the biggest benefits of the AppArmor Custom Mobile Safety Platform is the ability to make content changes to your app in real time. That is, the vast majority of the content – text, text colours, buttons, button icons, button shapes, phone numbers, email address and more – are all editable in real-time using the online dashboard.
The only catch was that previously you couldn’t make those changes and see them in your app without publishing those changes to all your users. With Draft Mode, that problem is solved!
Draft mode enables an authorized user to be able to preview “Draft Changes” from the designer in the Online Dashboard locally on their device. It essentially gives you a preview of the changes you’re planning on making in your app prior to publishing the changes out to your user base.
Step-by-step guide
Enable Draft Mode on your device:
All AppArmor apps have a settings or about/preferences button at the bottom of the main menu of the app. Start by tapping on that button.
- Tap the data update or “my data update” button in the app.
If draft mode is enabled on your app, there is subtle version code underneath the “check for updates” button. If draft mode isn’t enabled, reach out to our support team at support@apparmor.com to make it available.
Tap that version number seven times and a prompt will show up asking you for a password. The AppArmor support team has the password for draft mode for your app. If you don’t have the password yet, simply reach out to the support team at support@apparmor.com to get it.
A prompt will indicate that draft mode is enabled. Note that you may also get a second message; simply ignore it – as long as you get the message that draft mode was successfully enabled, you’re in good shape.
Now that we have draft mode enabled, let’s make some small changes:
- After having logged into the dashboard and gone to the designer, make a new button and call it function, which you want to test on your device prior to pushing out to your users.
To see it on your device, click “Save Draft Changes” in the top right corner. NOTE: DO NOT click “Publish” as this will publish the content to all users. Recall that we’re using draft mode to see the draft changes.
Go back to your device and see that “new updates are available, tap to update”; and voila! You can see the draft changes.
If the draft changed look good to you, go ahead and publish those changes out to your users by going back to the designer and hitting “publish”.
The last step is to disable draft mode:
- Go back into settings or about/preferences, then data update or “my data update”, and then hit the “disable draft mode” button.
- Now your app is back to the live version!
Draft Mode is a great way to preview and test changes you want to publish out to your users.
You can also use Draft Mode to test your push notifications. Simply open the “Push Notification Settings” section of the app, and complete the same steps as above, tapping the version code 7 times an entering your draft password.
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