![John Wargo [MSFT]](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/appcenter/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2019/02/user-1290-150x150.png){kind=avatar}
Focusing App Center on DevOps
Microsoft has always been focused on enabling developers to be more productive, to achieve their ambitions, and subsequently make the world better for it. We strive to build amazing experiences so that developers can seamlessly build, test, deploy, run, and monitor their code. Earlier last year, we launched the App Center Auth and Data services in early preview. Together with App Center Push, the three services form the App Center Mobile backend as a service (MBaaS) offering, and give developers an easy entry into using Azure as a backend for mobile apps.
At the start of this journey, we prioritized a growth mindset, the creation of a simple portal and SDK experience, and a customer first roadmap that would evolve based on feedback and feature requests submitted via our App Center repo. As we’ve received feedback and our learning matured, we realized that the better long-term path is for developers to use the native Azure services, namely Azure Active Directory B2C, Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Notification Hubs.
As a result, we are discontinuing efforts in the Auth, Data, and Push services and working to retire these preview services in App Center. With this change, we will focus App Center on delivering a world-class mobile and desktop DevOps experience. We will also work together with Azure teams to help migrate developers to the native Azure services, and ensure that Azure continues to be a great platform for your mobile apps.
What This Means to You
Your apps can continue to use these services for now; we want to give you ample time to consider, and implement other options for your apps before we retire the services. The following sections outline our phased MBaaS retirement plan.
Immediate Changes
Starting today, for apps that do not have any of the retired services configured, we removed each from the App Center portal UI. For any apps configured for Auth, Data, or Push, we implemented a migration experience in the portal to walk you through the process of moving from the retired services. For these customers, we recommend the following:
- Auth customers migrate their apps to use Azure Active Directory B2C
- Data customers migrate their apps to use Azure Cosmos DB
- Push customers migrate their apps to use Azure Notification Hubs
In an upcoming App Center SDK release, we will remove the Auth and Data SDKs. The App Center Auth and Data services will continue to operate until May 3, 2020, to give customers time to migrate to another solution.
Since App Center Push has more sophisticated backend requirements and more complex migration steps, Push will remain available longer to give customers additional time to complete their migration to a different service.
For more information on how to migrate to a corresponding Azure service, please refer to the migration guides for Auth, Data, and Push.
May 3, 2020
After this date, the Auth and Data services will no longer be available in the App Center portal; the services may continue to operate for a short while after this date, but you will not be able to interact with either service using the App Center portal UI.
App Center Push Retirement Timeline
Microsoft is committed to providing the best notification offering possible and we think the best way to do this is to focus our efforts on a single offering in Azure Notification Hubs. We know many of you value the unique features unique to App Center Push and we want to offer similar capabilities in Azure Notification Hubs. With that in mind, we’re working to create a transition plan which causes the least disruption to our existing customers as they move to Azure Notification Hubs.
When we have more details, we’ll communicate the final plan and timeline for App Center Push retirement.
Moving Forward
Thank you for participating in all our early previews, actively engaging in calls with our team, and sharing your feedback to collectively build App Center. Over the next 6 months, we’ll be hard at work with a list of DevOps focused improvements, and can’t wait for you to see them! As you begin your journey to migration, we’ll be with you every step of the way, so feel free to ask any questions via our App Center Support or share your feedback.
![Ela Malani [MSFT]](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/appcenter/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/letter-avatar/f06b4c35c1a6b4bab66fb8bfc7a546be.svg){kind=avatar}
I also am a little bit disappointed about the App Center Push integration retirement 🙁 Anyway, how is the migration plan for Azure Notification Hubs going?
I think this is the migration document you’re talking about
We’re making great progress and hope to have it published soon.
This is really disappointing. App Center Push was simple to use and easy to configure. I have several apps that use App Center push notifications, and what I am supposed to do now? Go back in time and spent hundreds of hours configuring every single app with Azure?! Please consider keeping at least the push service.
Really disappointing!
Microsoft is not providing any tools for React-Native developers that need offline data synchronisation after this decision.
Amazon if offering
https://aws.amazon.com/appsync/
Can you please advise how to manage this functionality in Azure using React-Native client application?
Thanks
App Center doesn’t support Storage and Offline sync for React Native apps. There is another offering from Microsoft – Azure Mobile Apps that enables offline sync capability but it doesn’t have React Native support as well. I’m afraid there is no Azure service that comes to my mind for React Native app development and offline storage.
THANKS FOR SUCH INFORMATION I THINK SOMETHING IS MISSING
Can you please be a bit more specific? What do you feel is missing?
Honestly, this sucks. We invested so much of our time in the Push service at the expense of Microsoft’s short-sighted product decisions. Now, we have to spend months migrating everything to another service. This is not the first time Microsoft has been disappointing to say the least.
Very disappointing. The App Center Push integration did seem to make this a much better experience. The vast majority of apps require Push Notifications and it made sense they...
Can you help me understand why you feel the transition will take months? We chatted with our top customers before we announced retirement and most indicated it would take a few weeks at tops. What is it about your environment that you think will drive that out? We’re interested in understanding what we can do to help make your transition easier.
Would like to add another voice as to how disappointing this is.
This was very easy to set up and use and we were able to get a non-developer to take over sending the notifications.
We have a requirement to send notifications only to users who have logged in to use certain private features of the app, and found the Audience feature very handy for this.
We’re also logging the App center device id in our...
The problem is that in App Center Audiences are limited to 1,000 devices and for many of our customers that limit prohibited them from using Push the way they needed to for their app. Azure Notification Hubs doesn't have that limitation and has a lot more flexibility in how you send notifications. I don't understand your comment about storing the device ID and that being useless information - that's the best way to do it,...
Ohh guys, I think it’s a wrong decision, can you analyze it again? Push Notifications is a very important feature for our apps and the mobile experience that you want to provide as a company, this was one of the reasons we choose AppCenter instead other platforms, without Push Notifications, Analytics or CodePush, AppCenter looks very basic, no one reason to still using it
Azure Notification Hubs is a more robust solution and eliminates many of the limitations of App Center Push. You should really take a look at it.
This is really really a problem for us. We are about to release a mobile app to 3 markets for one of our biggest customers.
We created multiple apps (2 for each market – iOS and Android) – so 6 in total all before end of Jan 2020.
We did test and and used push notifications on iOS, but not on Android.
Now Microsoft removed Push from the Android apps (since push was not used).
As I’ve explained in several other responses here, you can turn the Push UI back on by setting PNS credentials in your app using the App Center REST API. Don’t forget too about the blue chat button in the lower-right corner of any App Center page, that connects you directly with our dedicated support team and they could have directed you on how to reenable Push for your app.
Yeh, removing such an elegant Push implementation for what seems like only cost reasons really seems like dropping the ball here.
Hope you reconsider this.
Very sad. It will require a lot of effort/time to migrate all our products 🙁
Please consider keeping Push…