Firebase A/B test regex for iOS app version not working

Question

I am trying to limit my A/B test to the versions of my iOS app starting from 11.3.10. The reason is that older versions would behave identically for all variants as they contain no knowledge of parameters involved. This, in turn, would introduce noise which would make my experiment less conclusive.

So, I was adding the following regex to my app version property:

1[1-9]\.[3-9]\.[1-9][0-9]

Unfortunately, it didn't work. No users were taking part in my experiment. I then decided to try 1[1-9]\.[3-9]\.[1-9][0-9].*. But still, no luck. If I omit this setting and run my experiment, I immediately see the data for users taking part in it. 138 in 30 minutes to be precise.

My latest version (11.3.10) has roughly 30% adoption, so clearly I would see some users if the setting was correct.

I will be grateful if you could let me know what I am doing wrong here.

Answer 1

I got in touch with Firebase support and figured out what was wrong.

Although their docs mention "Version" everywhere (https://firebase.google.com/docs/ab-testing/abtest-config), the reality is that they are looking for Build Number instead. So, in my case, I needed to target all "versions" greater than 379 rather than all "versions" greater than 11.3.11.

If anyone is curious, here is a regex which achieves that:

(\d{4,}|379|3[8-9][0-9]|[4-9][0-9][0-9])

Answer 2

For 379+, these expressions might also work then,

^\d{4,}|379|3[8-9]\d|[4-9]\d{2}$

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\d{4,}|379|3[8-9]\d|[4-9]\d{2}

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^[0-9]{4,}|379|3[8-9][0-9]|[4-9][0-9]{2}$

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[0-9]{4,}|379|3[8-9][0-9]|[4-9][0-9]{2}

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\b[0-9]{4,}|379|3[8-9][0-9]|[4-9][0-9]{2}\b

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If you wish to explore/simplify/modify the expression, it's been explained on the top right panel of regex101.com. If you'd like, you can also watch in this link, how it would match against some sample inputs.

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Demo 2