How do I distribute Android app to beta tester without using Market

I have an early version of my app that I want some testers to take a look at. But I am not ready to put it on Market. How do I distribute it to my testers and how do they install it on their phones. One of the 开发者_运维知识库beta testers has a Asus eeePC with Android 2.0 installed and I would like him to try it too. How does this work?

They can just download it from any URL (go to the URL using the device browser) and install it.

They'll need to go to Settings->Applications and check the "Unknown Sources" checkbox.

You can just package the app up as a .apk from eclipse and host it anywhere. Then just have anyone you want visit the URL from their android an it will be installed. But as mentioned they will need to have the Settings->Applications and check the "Unknown Sources" checkbox checked first.

URL, ftp or any another manual distribution is good until you have a couple testers and less than 10 devices. Actually, there are many services for that. The biggest one was Testflightapps.com. But now it's Apple's service and they stoped support android. There are another though. Testfairy.com, Crashlitics(to collect and analize crashes from devices), etc. Just google it ;)

as mentioned in first answer you can download from unknown source by rendering to that URL

Apart from that, just make sure that your app hosting server supports MIME type downloading.(very basic but important)

On a device: In Settings-> applications, check "unknown sources. Now by putting the apk on the devices sd card you can navigate to its directory with a file manager such as Astro and install it.

On a simulator: While running an emulator, navigate to the /tools directory of the android SDK if you haven't added it to your PATH. Now execute "adb install path/to/your_application.apk".