If you're working on an app that holds user data, it's an absolute MUST to have dev and prod variants of your app in my opinion. By having two versions of your app you can safely work, fail, and fix in your dev environment whilst continuing to use your prod build daily. Then when you're happy with dev, you can do a build of your app with the production config to make sure that you test your user's update journey. It's the only way I can ship updates for Maxine without worrying about data loss