Expanding the Visual Studio App Center Network with OneSignal

John Wargo [MSFT]

June 27th, 20190 0

Successful apps use services from multiple partners, each delivering best of breed capabilities to maintain a close relationship with their users. Whether it’s a game, a social app, or brand, app developers can’t just toss the app out there and expect loyalty; they must do frequent updates to the app and engage day to day with their users in just the right way (not too little, not too much). Listening to developers describe their apps, how they build them, what services they use in them, and how they need to engage with users, we decided to branch out and do a little more.

Visual Studio App Center’s first response to this feedback was to start rounding out our offerings with new services like Auth and Data, released just a month ago in early preview. We’ve recognized the value of using App Center more closely with other products popular with app developers.

Developers need a system for managing campaigns, targeting users dynamically based on responses from previous notifications, location, events, etc. They also need A/B testing and an automated system for tracking and processing the results for campaigns across not only mobile, but web platforms as well.

For this reason, we’ve partnered with OneSignal to enable even more notification options than the built-in functionality, such as powerful user segmentation, automated messaging, A/B testing, and unlimited audience sizes. Developers can now look to OneSignal for configuring an integration with App Center Analytics. OneSignal users can choose to send their analytics events to App Center, which delivers powerful querying tools to integrate events across your app and your infrastructure, with SQL-like querying.

We’re excited to be working with OneSignal to explore new possibilities and options for our developer communities. This partnership will make it easier for developers to work with their core app services in one place. If you can think of ways we can make the integration stronger or more beneficial, please let us know by submitting a feature request to our public planning repository on Github.